CoachBack: Add value to your reps
It’s a bit daunting to imagine how many athletic repetitions a high-level athlete has performed over the course of a career. We are all acquainted with the phrase “practice makes perfect,” but how much practice? Success in fast-paced sports like volleyball or baseball relies on incredibly fine and precise movements that are often difficult to track with a coach’s eye. Indeed, professional teams with an appropriate payroll invest heavily in high-speed camera technology in order to carefully dissect a player technique.
But what if you’re a high school or college player who wants to get better, but doesn’t have the resources for hours of one-on-one coaching? If you have hundreds or thousands of hours of practice ahead, often bundled with a hefty coaching cost, you want to make each rep count. Enter the CoachBack cognitive system, which is designed to provide a second pair of eyes for your athletic repetitions, whenever you want it.
Functionality
The CoachBack system is a combination of a wearable arm sleeve and phone app. The sleeve is made of an accelerometer at the wrist, a band running along the outer arm from wrist to elbow to upper arm, a displacement/tension sensor near the shoulder, and a small computer that sends signals to your phone. In sports such as volleyball or baseball, it is very desirable to perform a particular motion — hitting or swinging — with the arm as straight as possible. The straightness of the arm can mean the difference between a spike or a blocked hit, a home run or an out. Every time the user performs a hit, the accelerometer will send a signal to the computer and the computer will measure the displacement of the band, which can then indicate how straight the arm is. The device will be able to provide far more precise feedback than a coach can on every single repetition.
Meanwhile, this hitting data is sent to a phone app that will record the arm straightness and shoulder angle for each hit. It catalogs this data and can correspond it to the outcome of the movement (this matching would have to be done after the fact, such as marking that Hit #1 and #3 were home runs, while #2 landed in the infield). The app can then draw relationships between a user’s physical arm position and the outcome of the movement. The cognitive aspect arises when the app can inform the user about the result of their movements, and effectively coach them to a higher success rate. The app would suggest things like “Your best hits are when your elbow angle is at about 88 degrees. Work on straightening your arm.” or “Your best swings are at a shoulder angle of 40, and your current shoulder angle is 45 degrees. Work on keeping your bat further behind you when you swing.” This system is able to provide precise, data-driven feedback on every movement, every time.
