Catapult wearable device

Nice article on AFR today about Catapult Sports moving into wearable devices to compete with Garmin/Fitbit etc.

The Australian sports biometrics software employed by thousands of professional teams around the world is coming soon to a wearable device on you.

Catapult Group, an ASX-listed, Melbourne-based company which rose out of the Australian Institute of Sport as part of efforts to improve the country’s gold medal tally in the Sydney Olympics, said it was working to convert the data and insights gathered by its professional clients into a “prescriptive” platform for amateur teams and athletes, to help improve performance and to help weekend players avoid injury.

Among its users is a who’s who of professional teams and sporting leagues including: Cricket Australia, the AFL and NRL here in Australia; Real Madrid; The New York Knicks; and the All Blacks. In March, the company said it had signed a deal with the largest sports federation in the world, the German Football Federation, to track player performance “at all levels of the German National Football Team”.

Chief executive Will Lopes said for those customers, Catapult was working on a platform that would incorporate biometric data captured by wearable tracking devices together with videos of athletes training and playing, to predict the outcomes of different training techniques.

Insights gained from that process would then flow into the platform Catapult was working on for ordinary consumers, bringing professional-grade advice and techniques down to everyday wearables, Mr Lopes told The Australian Financial Review.

“Despite the fascination that wearables like the Fitbit have created in the past 15 years, what most of them continue to do is just act as a diary of what you have done. Very little of those devices is prescriptive, telling you how you become better,” he said.

“What we’ve been working on this past year is starting to merge our professional and consumer datasets into a single platform, so we can start to do some big data analysis around things like: what is the difference between the exhaustion of a professional athlete versus the exhaustion of an amateur athlete? How do you bring some of that predictability down to consumers?

Chief executive Will Lopes saus Catapult is looking to professional athletes for training tips for everyday consumers.

“If you think about high school athletes or college sports or even the amateur weekend players, they don’t have the access to a staff that is going to tell them, ‘Here’s how I am going to prevent you getting a hamstring injury’ or ‘Here’s how I am going to help you get the best out of your team’,” Mr Lopes said.

He said he believed that if Catapult could take all the data it worked with and create professional style instructions for amateur sports and athletes, it would have a significant impact on the success and enjoyment of players – and ideally help them avoid injury.

“If you could find a way to recreate the professional platforms, and prescribe to consumers ‘here’s how you can avoid injury’, ‘here’s how you can be at peak performance’, it could really have a positive impact in sports,” he said.

Mr Lopes said the software was still a work in progress and could take 18 to 24 months to complete.

Telsyte senior analyst Alvin Lee said there was healthy demand for professional-grade sports features in wearable devices such as the Apple Watch.

Telsyte’s recent survey of Australian consumers found that two in three wearable owners liked to stay fit.

“Our research found wrist wearable users feel the urge to upgrade their existing device if a newer device has more professional-grade sports features [38 per cent], integration with their favourite fitness apps [56 per cent] or has more advanced health monitoring features [65 per cent],” Mr Lee said.

“We anticipate more focus on social and training elements from other service providers and manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, Garmin and Fitbit to drive user engagement and potential subscription services.”