The National Football League (NFL) has set itself the goal of better understanding the frequency and severity of player injuries in order to reduce their occurrence and make the game of football safer.
The NFL is America’s most popular sports league and home to more than 1,500 professional athletes. The NFL’s collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the “Digital Athlete,” a virtual representation of an NFL player based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that can be used to better predict and counteract player injuries.
The “Digital Athlete” has been used for the first time by all NFL clubs since last season and has proven to be a valuable tool by processing and analyzing large amounts of data in real time. Extensive data is collected from players via various sources: e.g. from videos recorded during games and training or from sensors in the stadium that record performance metrics via tracking devices in the players’ equipment.
Better insights lead to more informed decisions
A very important aspect of improving football game safety is reducing helmet impacts and mitigating their impact when they do occur. To do this, we first need better insight into the frequency of helmet impacts over the course of multiple games and seasons. The NFL is using AWS’s scalable compute power to run its ML workloads at scale and create the first comprehensive dataset of helmet impact injuries, dating back to 2016.
AWS Batch efficiently runs hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs while optimizing compute resources so users, businesses, and organizations can focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch is a fully managed batch computing service that schedules and runs containerized batch ML, simulation, and analytics workloads across the full spectrum of AWS compute offerings, such as Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and Spot or On-Demand Instances.
Lower costs and more game security in the NFL
By running with AWS Batch and other services, the NFL was able to minimize costs, optimize reliability, and maximize throughput. The data enables informed decisions to improve game safety through better equipment standards, rule updates, and improved coaching strategies. This shows how modern technologies like AI and cloud computing can be used to not only optimize athlete performance, but also significantly improve their safety.
Image: iStock
