Tracking the journey to Olympic Gold
You may know that Britain’s elite athletes are preparing to compete in Japan in a few days time, but did you know they’ll be depending on technology developed here in Bath?
Rocketmakers, the South West’s premier software development and design agency, has been working closely with UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport for nearly a decade now. The team was even recognized for its work by Her Majesty The Queen with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise (Innovation) in 2018.
It all started in 2014, when Rocketmakers was commissioned by the English Institute of Sport to create a new medical record system for athletes. The resulting system, known as the Performance Data Management System, or PDMS, did much more than organize and secure this incredibly sensitive data.
In addition to tracking medical records, PDMS captures high-quality athlete data with a specially designed app which asks questions several times a day. The required information varies from sport to sport, but typically athletes are asked to rate their energy level, intensity of training, and recovery. Other questions ask athletes to rate their quality of sleep, food intake, or even their mood.
If an athlete suffers an injury during training they are able to log it immediately, identifying the location of the injury on the body, level of pain, and any loss of mobility or strength.
An instrumental step towards a new era of Olympic success
Athlete-supplied information is matched up with medical records and plotted on a timeline. Coaches and medical staff are able to gain insights into past training patterns and history, stay up-to-date on an athlete’s present fitness in real-time, and plan training for competitions in ways that help maximise performance and minimise risk of injury.
PDMS was credited as being instrumental in the UK’s record medal haul in 2016, and nearly all of the UKs sport national governing bodies now use PDMS regularly.
Following the success of PDMS, UK Sport commissioned Rocketmakers to develop an overall project management system for elite sports programmes - a platform now known as “Fireball.”
Marginal gains. Big results
Cycling coach Matt Parker wanted to replicate the success of cyclists attaining “marginal gains,” across all sports. This concept was originally inspired by strategies used by the NASA Apollo moon landing programme in the 1960s. Matt approached Rocketmakers in 2018 to create a space-themed programme management tool that would allow top-level views and insight into both successful and unsuccessful medal attempts.
One key objective, and the main reason for the space-theme, was to build a website that would engage and excite coaches across the UK sports establishment. In the heat of a medal attempt, recording data is a task that is frequently overlooked (especially as most sporting bodies use Excel spreadsheets for recording data). Key data that could inform future decision-making can be lost at an alarming rate.
Everything about the Fireball design from the name to the graphics has been calculated to create an exciting user interface that will promote engagement among elite coaching staff. The slick, eye-catching imagery sits on top of an innovative and groundbreaking programme management back end, however. The upcoming games will be the most important test case for Fireball so far.
During the early stages of the first COVID-19 lockdown, Rocketmakers was again approached by UK Sport. This time the project was more urgent: an app to track covid symptoms among elite athletes.
Rocketmakers is extremely proud of its track record of helping British athletes produce results, and especially proud to be the developers the elite sports community calls during difficult times.
You can read more about Rocketmakers, their exciting projects and their amazing story by visiting their website or reaching out on any of their socials.