As one of the world’s most high-octane contact sports, American Football has always been about using power and strength to drive to victory.
But with player safety an increasing concern following several recent high-profile incidents, the governing NFL has been turning to technology, specifically Amazon Web Services’ ‘Digital Athlete’ program, in order to improve things for players across the league.
Digital Athlete
“Health and safety continues to be one of our top priorities at the NFL,” Herzog tells us, “and the digital athlete that we developed with AWS really is the backbone of almost everything we do (there).”
First launched in January 2022 the "digital athlete" injury prediction tool uses machine learning and AI to help identify when players are at an increased risk of injury, monitoring every single play before using this data to build and run models on a range of factors aimed at predicting and preventing injury.
“(The digital athlete) allows us to synchronize all of the data that we collect together to be able to create that digital representation of what happens on field,” Herzog adds, “it really gives us almost like a data laboratory to be able to test what we do in our health and safety efforts.”
The program is open to, and is well used by, every club in the NFL, Herzog notes, offering the chance to understand their own specific data, as well as how their players actually move, allowing the teams to optimize performance and safety measures.
This includes new computer vision and motion capture data to predict how a player’s body will react to certain situations such as a head-on tackle, analyzing movement patterns to ensure players remain safe on the field.
“AWS has been a fantastic partner - we’ve obviously been very successful with our work together with them,” Herzog says, “they’ve had a shared vision for player safety innovation, so have been a great collaborator…they have a sense of what is cutting-edge in terms of technology, and they’re constantly bringing new innovation to the table that we’re able to add into the program.”
Herzog notes the feedback from the clubs themselves has been really positive, as they obviously welcome the amount of data being provided by the NFL on top of the information they themselves collect.
But she notes the real strength of the digital athlete is that the NFL is able to harness the power of 32 clubs’ data together to provide aggregated data back to the clubs, showing them how they compared to the competition.
“The thing we hear most from them is that they’re excited about being able to leverage these bigger data sources and understand the aggregated data across the league,” she says, “they always want more data!”
“Each of our clubs is different, and so we’ve had a lot of success with the digital athlete at the league level by understanding how we can use the data to make the game safer, from a rule change or policy change perspective.”
This includes the dynamic kickoff rule being implemented in 2024, banning the hip drop tackle to reduce injury, and changes to the preseason structure to lessen the load on players. Overall, AWS says the system has so far delivered 700 fewer injury-related game absences in 2023, and the fewest concussions on record in 2024 since tracking began.
“That’s really the value,” Herzog says, “we’ll continue to do our work at the league level to try and find ways to make the game safer - our work won’t ever end with that, but now we’re able to give these large data sources back to the clubs so they can use them at their level, which just enhances our ability to make the game safer, as they know their players better than we do.”
“I’ve been so impressed by how data-driven our clubs and our league is - they are very happy to follow the data in terms of how decisions are made about rule changes and policy changes…all of that has been guided by the data and the science and the evidence that the digital athlete program allows us to generate even faster.”
When it comes to sports, AWS doesn’t just work with the NFL, but has high-level technical partnerships with Formula 1, the Bundesliga and many others, so I ask Herzog if her team’s work has attracted any envious glances from our sporting organizations.
“We’re always looking for ways to collaborate,” she says, “I think we see our work at the NFL and health and safety as really having the opportunity to influence other sports, and healthcare more broadly.”
“We have a continuing communication with AWS in terms of what’s available and what aren’t we thinking of - or what can we innovate on next? But also, how can we take what we’ve done with the digital athlete program and apply those learnings more broadly, whether that’s in the sports industry, or the healthcare industry - I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to be able to take our learnings, in this very unique environment…and improve health more broadly.”
Looking forward, it’s clear the digital athlete program has proved initially successful, and Herzog is effusive about the success and progress made so far.
But as she notes, eliminating injuries entirely in the NFL is not likely, and “concussion work will never be done” - as everyone will always want that number to go lower - but any progress being made is excellent news for everyone involved.
“We're pleased with the progress we've made so far - but there's always more work to do,” she concludes, “we've only scratched the surface on what can be done.”
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