A suite of tools are being developed by Fusion Sport to help athletes, coaches and sporting organisations to monitor athletes’ health and performance.

Dr Markus Deutsch, CEO of Fusion Sport gives us some insight into their new product that will be available via the web and smart phones.

Tell us about your sport science project.

Fusion Sport Pty Ltd has been building customised elite sport data management tools for 8 years, and it’s that experience that will help us develop an easy-to-use product for athlete monitoring for schools, clubs and amateur teams.

There are a range of basic mobile apps available for monitoring separate aspects of athlete performance and health, but they don’t provide an integrated, holistic view of the athlete. That’s the goal.

We want to create a simple, intuitive tool to combine the health, well-being and training responses of individuals to the various activities they are involved in, and integrate these various facets into simple interactive reports which athletes or coaches can use to gain a greater understanding of an athlete’s development.

How will these tools help athletes and sporting organisations?

The tools will provide athletes with real-time data via their mobile devices, tablet or personal computer. It will highlight personal progress as well as the impact of actions such as reducing or suddenly increasing training load on injury risk.

This is vital information for coaches to help understand how their athletes are responding to the different demands placed on them.

We want coaches to be able to use the data to assess readiness, manage injuries, run training programs, assess performance and keep athletes at their best.

What’s the next steps in the product development process?

With funding from the Advance Queensland Sport Science Challenge we will be making our ideas into reality.

Queensland Academy of Sport, Brisbane Grammar School, Netball Queensland and AFL Queensland are involved in our project and they are giving us a good range of athletes with different ages, sports and genders to work with. These partners will help with the initial scoping, prototype testing and quality assurance feedback at each stage of product development.

How do you see the future of this product?

This product has the ability over time to add coaching modelling and education tools as part of the suite. The true potential will be a one-stop self-service shop to meet the needs of a vast array of sports organisations, schools, coaches, athletes and individuals who want to get more out of themselves. They will be able to use the data tracking and findings to increase their knowledge to improve their decision making.

Down the track this will no doubt lead to in-built modelling and machine learning integration to provide statistics and predictive outcomes to facilitate assisted decision making around training. But for now, we can encourage inquiring minds to learn from the data and the interactive reporting tools. We believe it will go a long way to encourage better coaching practices, as well as to help athletes become more informed, healthier and achieve better sporting performances.

Our existing SMARTABASE platform will play a central role in the Commonwealth Games in 2018 and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, as the athlete management system for all Australian athletes, as well as athletes from Scotland, England, Canada, Qatar, Hong Kong and Malaysia. This funding will enable a new platform that suits a broader market to be developed. Junior athletes coming in to the elite system in the years to come will bring with them a valuable data history to optimise their future development.