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SportTechie reporter Andrew Cohen examines the lab used to help athletes.Andrew Cohen
Hospital for Special Surgery, the official hospital of teams including the New York Giants, Mets, Knicks and Liberty, is bringing its injury prevention expertise used in professional sports to youth athletics – with more than two million high school injuries recorded annually. Sports and about 30,000 results in hospital stay.
The total cost of these injuries is estimated at $5 billion in the US, which HSS aims to reduce with its new “Move Better Play Better” initiative. The hospital will select 50 U.S. high schools for the upcoming academic year to provide free online learning workshops and exercise programs focused on preventing muscle injuries, which are on the rise among young athletes.
“There’s a little variation here and there, hopefully prevention interventions are making a difference, but the overall trend is increasing,” said Joseph Janoski, director of injury prevention programs at HSS. “And when it comes to injuries, that’s not good.”
Janoski credits improved diagnostics — coaches and trainers are better at spotting injuries — and data collection that injuries are on the rise in today’s young athletes compared to previous generations. Other contributing factors include obesity and increased screen time.
“General fitness levels and children’s ability to participate in sports with the equipment and physical skills they need are declining. “We see that obesity was higher before the epidemic and higher now,” Janoski said. “We look at fitness test scores in physical education classes, and the results continue to decline. Limited physical education, too much screen time, kids not meeting required levels of physical activity daily or weekly, all lead us down this path of poor quality of activity.
Schools in the new program will get access to a learning management system that provides on-demand video modules on how to correctly perform basic activities. Janoski believes that adapting recommended exercise routines can prevent half of all musculoskeletal injuries and reduce one-third of injuries, including concussions, that could be prevented through improved body control.
Athletes attend workshops to show them how to move better and reduce injuries.Given by a special surgery hospital
“Historically, we’ve always delivered content live, in person, in real time. Of course, the pandemic changed things and pushed us to do things,” Janoski said. “We can make all of this content available on demand so that coaches and parents and kids can complete these things asynchronously at their convenience.”
Risk factors for common musculoskeletal injuries such as ACL tears and ankle sprains can be related to an athlete’s movement in ways that place excessive stress on their ligaments and muscles as they run, jump, land, and change direction. HSS conducted a pilot with about 1,000 children and videotaped each of them performing five movements, variations of the downhill and vertical jumps, which were manually analyzed by biomechanics experts.
“The way our screening works is that you get a score on each of these five tasks. A score of five is bad; that means the risk factor was present in all five tasks in the five tests,” Janoski said. “The average score of the pilot group is around 4.2. When we turned that into a percentage, we were blown away by the fact that 84% of these kids were meeting risk factors. It’s a scary number.”
Janoski said a study by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK found that screen time for children aged 6-10 increased to 80 minutes a day before the outbreak. HSS exercise content is made available to kids through screens, but Janoski says that “passive screen time” like sitting on a bean bag playing video games is different from “active screen time” watching a peloton instructor during a bike workout.
“We were in a really bad place, pre-pandemic, and now we’ve added 80 minutes of screen time a day for kids. It’s a big reason we have to push back,” he said. “Now we can use technology to get exercise and active screen time to help protect kids from these injuries.”
During the outbreak, the Hospital for Special Surgery created new digital content to train athletes on how to avoid injuries and identify risk factors.Andrew Cohen
The hospital plans to launch a mobile motion analysis app later this year that uses computer vision with a smartphone camera to detect signs of injury in the movements of young athletes. Both Dari’s motion biomechanics analysis AI camera system and the Proteus motion strength training machine include investors from HSS and golf star Bryson DeChambeau at HSS’s new How You Move Lab in Stamford, Conn. Movement evaluations start at $99 per session, and HSS offers lab tours for kids looking for additional training. .
“We’re using motionless motion capture. [from Dari Motion] and Proteus, which [measures] “Power and speed in 3D, and getting that technology to feed us data,” said exercise physiologist Polly de Mille at How You Move Lab.
“Kids are now specialized and just playing their sport. They’re not learning how to jump and land, at least the kids we’ve seen. Nobody’s doing real strength and conditioning. It’s always just the sport,” De Mille said.
If Janoski can speed up time, motion-capture technology used in pro sports is at the top of his list of tools he wants to expand into youth sports.
“Technology has evolved now to look at certain body angles and look at things like kinematics and hip angle, for example if it’s a baseball player throwing, look at the elbow,” he said. “So the amount of data that that technology generates in game time is very alarming. It’s clear that we have a long way to go before it’s implemented at any low level.”
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