The Promise of Telemetrics in Athletics and Every Day Clothing

Liberty. Equality. Data. Podcast #13 with Quin Sandler, CEO of Plantiga.

What does your walking pattern tell about you? Can it help you boost your sports performance? How about can it help prevent injury or rehabilitate you after an injury? Could we see everyday clothing and shoes incorporate sensors that we as individuals could utilize ourselves?

In this episode of the Liberty. Equality. Data. Podcast, we are joined by Quin Sandler, CEO of Plantiga. The company Plantiga is a human analytics company based in Vancouver, Canada and has been working on gait analytics, sensors, and instrumented footwear for over 10 years. We talk about their work with professional sports teams, such as the NBA and teams like the Golden State Warriors. Quin shares their story from founding the company with his father and the vision to have smart sensors powering all of us under our feet.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

The transcript of the conversation is available here.

Here are the main topics covered in the podcast:

• The origins of Plantiga, and what their propriety AI solution “Norman” stands for
• The power of GAIT tracking and meaningful insights for professional athletes as well as every consumer
• Early challenges of building a consumer wearables product
• The unbreakable link between data, performance and prevention
• The current trends in the wearables market

1/ Plantiga: how it all started

Quin, the co-founder of Plantiga, provided an insightful overview of their innovative sensor technology embedded in footwear.

Plantiga has developed a small sensor pod, similar to an IoT device, that can be placed under the arch of a shoe, orthotic, or insole. This device measures various biomechanical aspects, including movement, joint angles, forces, ground contact time, flight time, stride length, jump performance, speed, acceleration, and deceleration.

Essentially, they’ve recreated the capabilities of a gait lab, typically found in universities or labs, within footwear. Their primary focus is currently on supporting injury prevention and performance enhancement for athletes, including NCAA and professional teams.

Quin also shared a touching origin story, highlighting the role of his father in the company’s founding, as well as the challenges they faced, including his father’s battle with prostate cancer. In his father’s honor, Plantiga’s AI is named Norman, reflecting the profound impact his father had on the company’s journey.

2/ Early challenges of building a sensorized shoe insole for

“Sensors are about tracking how you stack up against yourself — comparing you against you is the best way of doing any type of wearable or health data.” — Quin Sandler

Quin explained the significance of understanding human gait , which refers to how individuals walk and run, essentially defining how their limbs move during these activities. He highlighted the prevalence of gait labs in universities and rehab hospitals worldwide, equipped with sophisticated technologies such as motion-capturing cameras and force plates to analyze and track human movement.

Quin further discussed his father’s key insight: the need to democratize access to gait analysis data. While traditional gait labs had the tools to make valuable assessments, the accessibility to such resources was limited. His vision was to streamline and make gait analysis more accessible by developing a wearable solution, ultimately integrating it into people’s shoes.

This insight aimed to make a profound impact on human health, as gait analysis could serve as an early warning system for various conditions, from stroke to Parkinson’s disease. This insight was the foundation of Plantiga’s journey towards creating a wearable technology that could bring gait analysis to a broader population.

To achieve this vision, Plantiga leveraged advancements in sensor technology, particularly a 16G IMU (inertial measurement unit) developed by Analog Devices in 2017–2018. This sensor provided the ability to measure rotational and linear accelerations in a compact and power-efficient form.

Quin explained that early IMU sensors were bulky, expensive, and power-hungry, but advancements made it possible to develop more efficient and smaller sensors suitable for wearable applications. The company went through multiple iterations and prototypes to refine their hardware, focusing on overcoming challenges such as sensor noise and offset bias.

They also highlighted their focus on data accuracy, validity, and reliability, making them more than just a hardware company but rather a data-driven technology company. This commitment to creating an accurate and accessible gait analysis solution took several years of dedicated effort and innovation.

3/ Early Challengers and Paths to Success

Quin discussed the early challenges faced by Plantiga in building the company, emphasizing the difficulties in developing reliable hardware for their wearable technology. He mentioned that it was only about eight weeks ago that they felt they had a truly reliable product, marking the fifth generation of their hardware.

Plantiga had faced numerous issues with their earlier versions, including data collection failures during high-intensity situations with top athletes like Klay Thompson and Russell Westbrook. They encountered problems such as battery failures, interconnect issues, and data packet loss, which caused frustration and setbacks.

Quin highlighted the pain, iteration, and learning involved in hardware development compared to software, and the challenges they had to overcome, including transitioning from wireless to wired technology.

Despite these challenges, teams and organizations were willing to put up with the initial tech failures because the promise of Plantiga’s wearable technology was compelling. Coaches, physical therapists, and performance teams in sports organizations sought a solution that could provide lab-grade data in real-world environments, addressing the gap between controlled lab assessments and on-field performance.

The promise of accurately measuring an athlete’s movements in ecologically relevant settings was a significant driving force for Plantiga’s adoption, despite the early hiccups in their technology.

4/ The nexus between data, performance and prevention

Plantiga’s wearable technology involves sensor pods embedded in footwear, providing valuable data on 270 different parameters related to biomechanics, including ground contact time, range of motion, footstrike patterns, flight time, stride length, limb speeds, and more.

This data is used to create a unique movement signature for each individual user, enabling personalized monitoring and detection of deviations from their baseline.

The technology serves multiple use cases, including injury prevention, rehabilitation, performance optimization, fall prevention in older adults, and occupational health and safety.

One of the primary applications in the NBA is baseline assessment for healthy players during training and scrimmages to establish a reference point. In the event of injuries, players wear the sensors daily to monitor their progress and ensure they are recovering in line with expectations.

The technology acts as a diagnostic tool, flagging any concerning deviations from an individual’s usual movement patterns, serving as a “check engine light” for athletes.

Performance or prevention are two sides of the same coin. It is a cycle: you have to be healthy to perform. At one point, I may be performing at a high level, then something happens, and I get injured. We go through these cycles over and over, it’s continuous. That’s what human health is. — Quin Sandler

5/ Emerging trends in the wearables market

The podcast host Chetan Nandakumar asked Plantiga’s founder Quin to discuss the current trends in the wearables market.

Wuin emphasised the importance of addressing real-world problems rather than focusing solely on technology. He highlighted the challenge of distinguishing between products that are “vitamins” (nice-to-have) and those that are “cancer drugs” (essential).

Quin noted that the success of wearables hinges on their ability to provide value by seamlessly integrating into users’ lives, becoming unobtrusive and intuitive, and addressing both enhancement and prevention needs.

Regarding future trends in wearables, Quin pointed to the growing emphasis on unobtrusive data collection. He highlighted the potential of smart fabrics that can collect data without requiring additional cumbersome hardware like battery packs. Quin also stressed the significance of passive data collection and its potential in various domains, particularly healthcare, where wearables can facilitate the connection between healthcare professionals and patients, providing objective health data.

Ultimately, the wearables market is moving beyond the initial hype to offer practical, integrated solutions for consumers, with a focus on both enhancement and prevention.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

The transcript of the conversation is available here.

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