Artificial Intelligence in Sports
Artificial Intelligence is and has been transforming a lot of industries and Sports is one which is catching up quickly. We are seeing immense impact of AI on Players, Coaches, Teams, Management and the Fans.
The following are some use cases where AI is being used extensively:
Player performance analysis
Injury prevention and rehabilitation
Coaching and Training
Game strategy and Analysis
Referee Assitance
Talent Scouting
Fan Engagement
Player performance analysis
In the modern day of sports a lot of athlete data is captured during pre, post and in-season through GPS devices, trackers, heart rate montirs and cameras. This is then collected, cleaned and fed in to a pipeline for the AI to make sense of it. The AI models developed can indentify patterns, trends, to generate performance metrics and indicators based on the analysed data.
The analysed data can be used to derive personalised reccomendations, expert feedback and to generate visualisations for all stakeholders in the game to understand players strengths and weaknesses and areas of improvement.
There are solutions built for the elite and for the grassroot levels as well. We built HomeGround to help aspiring cricketers get access to metrics and personalised recommendations which is affordable and accesible.
Injury prevention and Rehabilitation
AI is able to receive information through werables, trackers and cameras to make Movement and Biomechanical assessment to identify potential risks (injury) and recommend preventive measures. This not only helps atheltes deliver at peak performance but also be efficient in managing their training and game workloads.
https://zone7.ai is a company that builds tools using AI to forecast Injury risk and plan load management.
Coaching and Training
Access to quality coaching is one of the most important factor in shaping the future and capability of an athlete. With advent of AI and multiple ways of capturing data quality coaching can be made both accessible and affordbale.
Professional or Elite teams and players use technology that leverages the power of AI to analyse their training and provides metrics and recommendations to improve. For athletes playing at the top a 1% difference means a lot and they are including AI in their toolbox to have an edge over their peers.
The grassroots is not left behind and with the power of AI and devices like smarpthones being accessible to the masses, a lot of solutions are bening built. For example HomeGround is a solution we built to cater to the needs of 300 Million cricketers worldwide to provide quality and affordable cricket training.
There are a host of applications that help grassroot athletes get access to quality training to improve their game and help them play the game they love the most
Game strategy and analysis
With a huge number of games being played round the year it is difficult to manually capture, store and analyse each game. With the use of AI there are solutions that automate video capture of the matches being played anywhere, and can automate most of the analysis as well. It helps the video or performance analyst save a lot of time in identifying, tracking and analysing the individual athlete. It is essential in reviewing previous matches played under different setting and situations and come up with an analysis that works for the upcoming encounters. Computer Vision plays an important role in gathering and anlysing this information.
Referee Assitance
AI is being used in collecting and assisting the referee in multiple sports to make better decisions. VAR (Video assistant referee) in soccer, Hawkeye in Cricket and Tennis are some of the examples where high quality video is processed and visualised for the referees, coaches and fans to understand the game better and make better decisions. However there are instances where the technology fails to deliver and the human has to take over for the final call.
Talent scouting
We spoke about the importance of talent scouting in cricket and how technology is used. Essentially technology is used in data caputre and analysis, player profiling, performance prediction, player comparison, scouting network optimisation and data-drive decision making
Fan Engagement
Chatbots, personalised content recommendations, immersive experiences, the rise of NFT’s and game based engagement has given the fans a plethora of experiences to choose from to stay connected with their favourite teams. With COVID-19 bringing live game experiences to a halt, a lot of innovation has been made in this field to assist the fan in not loosing out on the exeprience of watching a live game.
These are some of the areas where AI is making headway in sports