by Sean Devlin, Front Rush
For the past few weeks, I’ve been wearing a Nike Fuel Band and a Fitbit. Both devices are wristbands that track various data sets of your physical being. They track them through built in accelerometers and pedometers and then allow you to sync your data wirelessly to your iPhone, Android, etc (device specific). The idea is that without you having to manually enter a bunch of information, you can track your health by knowing the number of steps you’ve taken in a day, the length of time that you were physically active, how many hours you slept, etc. You can also set goals for each of these data points as a way to gamify your physical health.
Tracking personal data is becoming a common trend known as “quantified self” and it extends to essentially anything. For instance, how many emails you send in a day, how your weight has fluctuated over time or what your daily calorie in take is. What’s interesting is the potential for these (or similar devices) to expose data coaches could use to benefit their coaching, recruiting and evaluating similar to the way “Moneyball” changed baseball (and now basketball and others).
Through hardware that athletes wear, we potentially can learn more about them specifically or the respective sport in aggregate ways that can be used to your advantage. For example, we could strap a device to a lacrosse stick to track acceleration of shots or put a device on a pair of shoulder pads and track the forces of a hockey hit. What about tracking the most common area of impact on an athletes serve or the spin of a baseball pitch? These are hypotheticals and some already exist, but what we are talking about is making this data so cheap and accessible that anyone with $100 bucks can generate it and have access to it. It’s really interesting to know that there is a whole other side to this evaluation thing that we haven’t touched because we haven’t yet been able to generate enough data to know its value.
We really like the evaluation potential because it brings the data to the forefront and balances it with the historical anecdotal observation. An analysis on your athletes can be done prior to the visual evaluation which leads to more precise estimates and more focus on key athletes (i.e you can filter out athletes based on these new data points similar to the way you know if they are a fit for your school because of academic credentials.)
So what about the Nike Fuel Band and Fitibit? Well, I’ve learned that they are both very inconsistent and seemingly inaccurate. Even when worn at the same time, on the same wrist, they produce different results for the same data point One will say I took 10,000 steps in one day while the other will say 11,000. So right now I think it is up to a creative coach to find a way for either to make an immediate impact on their team but no doubt the future will be super cool.
