NFL turns to Amazon for help in tackling player injuries

The collaboration aims to develop new tools and generate deeper insights into concussions and other player injuries.

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After signing a pact with the Seattle Seahawks last week, Amazon Web Service announced a much larger deal with the NFL to use its technology to tackle concussions and other devastating injuries.

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AWS will offer the NFL artificial intelligence and machine learning tools in the hope that the competition can ultimately predict the risk of player injury, Thursday announced.

Amazon Rekognition, Amazon ML Solutions Lab and Amazon SageMaker will be used by NFL data scientists, developers and doctors to develop a platform called “Digital Athlete”.

With “Digital Athlete” the competition can make a simulated model of an NFL player and go through an endless number of game scenarios to get a better understanding of which situations lead to injury.

Competition physicians will also use other data such as equipment selection, playing surface, playing type, environmental factors, aggregated and anonymous player injury information and player position to better understand how to treat or rehabilitate injuries.

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“The NFL is determined to reinvent the future of football,” said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in a statement.

“When we apply next generation technology to improve the health and safety of players, everyone wins – from players to clubs to fans. The results of our collaboration with AWS – and what we will learn about the human body and how injuries happen – can go far beyond football. As we look forward to our next 100 seasons, we are proud to partner with AWS in that endeavor, “Goodell added.

More than most sports competitions, the NFL is hit almost every year by devastating injuries to star players. Earlier this week, ESPN drew up a report highlighting the New York Jets, which have a leading salary of $ 61.5 million for players who are out for the rest of the season. That is one third of the team’s total salary margin, which limits the ability to find replacements and remain competitive.

The NFL has also had to deal with decades of research into the care policy for active and retired players.

This season, the competition has been criticized for the fact that team doctors can still make life-changing decisions about today’s players in the heat, when most players are more likely to ignore future health implications just to stay in play.

The same New York Jets team that was plagued by expensive injuries created a fire storm in October when team officers tried to force Pro Bowl guard Kelechi Osemele to skip the operation for a damaged shoulder and keep playing through it. He refused and still had surgery and doctors said the damage to the shoulder was greater than they had expected.

After Osemele had surgery, the team fined and fired. In several statements, team representatives said they believed Osemele should have ignored the pain and played with the injury, amazing players throughout the competition. Osemele finally filed a complaint against the team that is still pending.

In a live stream press conference, Goodell said that part of the competition’s goal in using Amazon’s tools was not only to predict injuries, but also to find out the best practices for rehabilitation and recovery.

According to the competition statement, it will also use computer vision models through Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Rekognition to detect concussions and identify the situations that generally cause them.

Concussion is one of the most common problems of sport and has led to a marked decrease in young people’s interest in football.

In 2013, the NFL reached a settlement with 4,500 former players and agreed to pay nearly $ 1 billion to cover concussion and head injury health care costs after denying years of causing long-term brain damage.

Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of AWS, said in a statement that Amazon’s tools can help a new generation of NFL players to prevent some injuries that have caused players lifelong pain.

“By leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, the NFL is increasing its leading position in promoting innovation and improvements in health and player safety, which is good news not only for NFL players, but also for athletes everywhere,” said Jassy.

“This partnership offers the NFL and AWS an opportunity to develop new approaches and advanced tools to prevent injuries, both in and possibly outside of football.”

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