In 2024, the NFL had its lowest concussion fee on report, lowering 17% from the earlier 12 months, because of the NFL’s AI-powered athlete efficiency and harm prevention expertise, the Digital Athlete. After years of concussion analysis and partnerships, Jennifer Langton, former senior vp of participant well being and innovation for the league, spearheaded the AI-led strategy to harm prevention.
Langton was a school athlete whose profession ended abruptly with a knee harm. “One among my biggest challenges in my life turned inspiration for transformation to assist to mitigate [injuries] from occurring [to] NFL gamers,” she says.
Langton joined the NFL after a stint because the North American CFO of Atari. After graduating along with her MBA, she carved a brand new place within the NFL’s well being and security division, tackling the concussion drawback.
A technological breakthrough
Work on the Digital Athlete started years in the past, with a collection of strategic partnerships. “We spearheaded with GE [General Electric]. What we known as it was a $60 million head well being initiative… to raised perceive diagnostics for mind harm,” Langton explains. This early collaboration laid essential groundwork by bringing collectively numerous experience. “The inspiration of that work for me was the breakthroughs that we had if you collaborate with others moderately than [doing] it by yourself.”
This foundational analysis on head well being developed into a scientific evaluation of how accidents occur on the soccer discipline with Jeff Crandall, Ph.D., an knowledgeable in auto security. “His insights allowed us to have a brand new perspective on how he would take a automobile crash [and] simulate it within the lab… to mitigate the forces and impacts that result in harm,” Langton explains. The staff tailored Crandall’s crash-test methodologies particularly for athletes, making use of automotive security engineering ideas to the distinctive dynamics of soccer collisions.
Initially, the NFL’s strategy to understanding accidents concerned vital guide effort. “Dr. Crandall and his staff would evaluate each single concussion by human eye, labeling 150 variables, defining what occurred in that concussion,” Langton says. “To rely the variety of head impacts per recreation took 4 days.” This tedious course of restricted how rapidly groups may apply insights.
The turning level and thought to make use of AI to course of the information sooner got here throughout a go to to GE’s innovation lab, the place Langton noticed a “digital twin” used to foretell failures in turbine engines. A digital twin is a digital recreation of an actual particular person or object used to simulate how that particular person or object would react below bodily disturbing situations. “Once we left, we mentioned, ‘Effectively, what if we create the digital athlete?’” she recollects.
To carry this imaginative and prescient to life, the NFL did an in depth street present tour to seek out the precise expertise companions. “We visited all people from Microsoft, Google, Amazon Net Companies,” she says. They selected AWS as a result of “they have been strategically aligned to [the NFL’s] imaginative and prescient. If we wished to foretell accidents, we knew that there have been applied sciences that didn’t exist that we’d need to construct. And so they noticed our imaginative and prescient and agreed to it. Our finish objective was to scale back accidents and optimize efficiency.”
Langton’s staff additionally visited educational establishments like “MIT and Columbia, as a result of they knew the place the R & D was for brand spanking new applied sciences like pose estimation—how do you quantify the physique motion and laptop imaginative and prescient? As a result of it was simply at its infancy then,” she says. With the assistance of expertise and AI-powered scientific analysis, Langton’s staff created the Digital Athlete.
How the Digital Athlete works
The Digital Athlete platform creates a digital illustration of each NFL participant by integrating a number of information sources, like recreation and apply video footage, sensors in shoulder pads that monitor participant actions, efficiency metrics from staff coaching, and biomechanical evaluation of impacts.
With laptop imaginative and prescient expertise, the system analyzes what as soon as took days in seconds. The system identifies particular motion patterns that result in accidents for particular person gamers or positions. For instance, “if a quarterback is rushed, he braces the ball and never himself. And when that occurs, he’s extra more likely to get injured at the back of the top… as a result of he’s holding onto the ball,” Langton explains. This perception allowed groups to change coaching methods and gear design to deal with particular harm dangers.
The information gathered from the Digital Athlete platform remodeled helmet design. Crandall’s principle was, “Why isn’t a quarterback’s helmet designed with extra energy-absorbent materials at the back of the top to stop these forces from impacting that place?” Langton says. “A lineman takes completely different frontal lobe hits. Why isn’t a helmet designed to stop that affect from occurring to these gamers?”
By sharing their findings with producers, the NFL enabled the creation of position-specific helmets designed to deal with the distinctive impacts skilled by completely different gamers. The outcomes have been dramatic: “We had 9 instances the speed of innovation for helmet efficiency. It was remarkable,” Langton says.
Gear managers for every staff helped promote the thought of those new helmets to gamers. “We began that training one-on-one with each staff. One 12 months, we [had] 40% of gamers in top-performing helmets that examined effectively within the lab. The subsequent 12 months, we went to 99%,” Langton says.
Individuals on the middle of expertise
People have been on the middle of each step of the Digital Athlete’s improvement course of. “The 32 NFL groups have essentially the most distinctive athlete administration groups…. We [had] to place them on the middle. We [had] to say, ‘What’s it that you just’re doing, and what information do it’s essential to do your job higher?’” Langton says. “Why? As a result of they know the athlete. They see the athlete every single day.” The NFL targeted on making the expertise serve the folks utilizing it moderately than forcing folks to adapt to the expertise.
The NFL can now combine and mixture information throughout all 32 groups. “If you consider one working again, one staff solely manages a 53-man roster. However when you can evaluate that working again throughout all working backs throughout the league, that’s the facility of what we have been bringing to them,” Langton says. The Digital Athlete can spot harm dangers for particular gamers and work throughout groups to seek out patterns between specific positions.
Langton sees AI not as a alternative for human creativity and productiveness however as an enhancement of it. “AI is extra of an empowerment software, not a alternative, to assist [people] do their jobs extra successfully and effectively,” she says.
The NFL’s success exhibits that when organizations companion and hold the people who will use the expertise on the middle of the method, they’ll remodel how folks work, whether or not on the soccer discipline or within the workplace.
Picture by Danny E Hooks/Shutterstock
