Leveraging Data from Wearables

Steven Hirsch -

📝 Weekly paper summary

Wearable technology: Action or distraction - Sportsmith
How do practitioners continue to deal with and make sense of 24/7 athlete data from the wearable technology revolution?
Sportsmith

Category

Online article

Context

Everyone is familiar with wearable technologies (smartwatches, rings, heart rate monitors, GPSs, etc.) taking the world by storm. The blog article talks about the tricky problem of making sense of all this data for tracking fatigue, readiness, or illness.

Contributions

The authors present four questions that practitioners should ask themselves to identify how data can be leveraged:

  1. Meaningful: related to the variables that most strongly support health, or determine performance that will provide a competitive advantage to your athlete/team
  2. Actionable – generates information that athletes or coaches can act upon to positively effect performance
  3. Falsifiable:  tests something that can be proved wrong
  4. Novel / Non-obvious: isn’t something that coaches or athletes already know, or that they can more easily figure out themselves

Here are a couple of key quotes from the rest of the article that I think you'll also find interesting:

"Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean you should"
"...data from wearable technology should be treated like a smoke signal – a sign of where to look to uncover deeper insight and meaning – rather than a full-blown fire that you need to fan or douse with water straight away."

🧠 Fun fact of the week

Most people associate pyramids with Egypt or South America. However, did you know there's a pyramid in Rome? This pyramid was built as a tomb for Gaius Cestius in 12BC and still stands today in a very preserved condition! Something to look out for next time you're in Italy :)

🎙 Podcast recommendation

I find Wolfram's ideas really interesting, so I've been enjoying the start of this 12 Chapter series!

🗣 Quote of the week

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong."

- Richard Feynman