Sunday, October 12, 2014

Revolutionizing sports

Analytics is one of the most important parts in today’s sports. Learning from your own mistakes is the best way to improve in pretty much anything, and what else can give you a better feedback on your mistakes than technology. While coaches are definitely necessary in every sport, they cannot be as precise as technology when it comes to analyzing one’s mistakes. We all know traditional analytical devices such as movement trackers and simple video cameras, but now people are trying to push sports analytics to the next level, enhancing sport performance even more.

Since the beginning of every sport there has been a constant competition over the first place in each of them. As the time goes on people are continuing to beating previous records, which would seem impossible considering most sports tracked its records for many years. How is that records, which are put by the best in the world are beaten almost every year? The answer is simple: technology. With the help of technology sport performance is improved almost every year, which allows for the new records to be set. Without technology in sports old records would be harder to overtake and sports would not be as exciting as it is today.

Most of the sports nowadays are using all kinds of performance tracking devices in order to improve their weaknesses. Some of the simpler ways to do so is just recording yourself during a game or a practice to see where you could improve. This method is used widely in every sport to learn from the past data. However human’s capabilities of remembering every mistake they made is limited, that is why Cynthia Rudin, associate professor of statistics at MIT built a predictive analytics tools, called Big Data, in order to improve critical decision making of sportsmen. Big Data would help sport analytics in many ways, from adapting training plans to helping athletes improve overall.

Big Data can be used not only for performance enhancement, but also for health and safety purposes. As we all know sports can be rather dangerous at times, it can be the cause anything ranging from simple injury to a long lasting physical damage. Players can avoid being injured by using the predictive analytics technology. Pro players everywhere are given sensors, which monitor intensity level, collision and fatigue, in order to reduce and remove potential injury risk. Coaches can also use this data to modify training procedures minimizing injury risk during practices.

Analytical devices are used widely in every sport, in order to improve performance and reduce the injury risk of sportsmen. They play a big role in sports history and are one of the reasons why sports are always exciting to watch. Big Data is one of the recent, but definitely not the last analytical tool brought into the world of sports. Sports will continue to grow and improve and I don’t think we will hit perfection point in sports at any time soon.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/oct/06/big-data-revolutionising-sport-in-unexpected-ways]

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