Automated Force-Velocity Profiling of NFL Athletes via High-Frequency Tracking Data

The ability to measure key physical parameters of athletes is becoming increasingly critical for today’s sports organizations. Force-velocity profiling is a well-understood and studied technique for measuring the relationship between speed and output force in sport-specific contexts. Accurate force-velocity profiling systems can enable a wide variety of applications for sports organizations to improve player performance, cater better training programs, and potentially reduce injury rates in the long term. A current limitation of many of these systems is that they can require context-specific testing that impacts workflows for players, coaches, and trainers. Given the recent rise of wearable sensor technologies that track player movement in dynamic contexts, there is a clear opportunity to leverage new data streams to enhance this process. We present a novel system for automated force-velocity profiling using publicly available high-frequency tracking data of NFL players. We demonstrate that our derived force-velocity envelopes match observed position and player performance, and provide a proof of concept framework that would allow teams to leverage automated force-velocity profiling in their internal operations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Lyons, Kevin Andrew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hosoi, Anette

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139345

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/139345