“A lot of injuries happen because of how you interact with the ground, either the center of pressure in your feet are in the wrong place, or you start a movement too fast, or the movement takes too long,” Wagner said. From just one scan, Sparta’s ultra-sensitive force plates can capture up to six million data points, analyzing everything from an athlete’s body weight, movement-response variability, muscular entropy, balance, and force impact with the ground. The technology works like this: Users do simple movements (like a jump or a plank) on the plate for less than 90 seconds. In 2016, Wagner founded Sparta Science - and its force plate technology and analytics software is now used by professional sports teams across the country, like the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns. “I thought, ‘How can we look at movement differently and come up with a much better system that improves the outcomes?’” he said. So frustrated in fact he decided to go to medical school and apply the same methodology doctors use to diagnose disease to create better injury prevention techniques. “I really committed myself to prevention, to rehab, but injuries kept happening and I was just so frustrated.” “I think the most painful part was really emotionally, when you really commit to something and the outcome doesn’t change,” he said. And to his own dismay, these repeated injuries are what forced him to stop playing altogether. Force plates and smart scales Sparta ScienceĪs a rugby and football player, Phil Wagner got injured a lot. In the last decade, many professional athletes and teams have adopted the regular use of wearables, force plates, and radio-frequency identification sensors to better gauge what types of movement affect a player’s performance and risk of potential injury. Its mission is not necessarily to “prevent” injury, ironically, but to learn from the human body’s clues when it’s weak and wounded in hopes to mitigate damaging events from happening again. Off the field, however, a burgeoning industry of injury-prevention technology is infiltrating practice arenas and locker rooms. Bones break, tendons snap, and heads collide. When you put two dozen of the country’s most elite players - with adrenaline pumping through their veins - in a 100-yard playground where they’re told to bump, push, and tackle one another in pursuit of glory, things are bound to get boisterous.

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