IMeasureU (IMU)

Inertial Sensor and Software platform to precisely quantify body movement and workload metrics in the field

[imeasureu]

It’s about cohesion

By Jessica Alberto

Hi! I’m Jess, aka ‘Jalbatross’ in the office, and I have had the pleasure of being a software development intern for IMU over the course over the last 4 months.

Coming into an internship, you never really know what to expect - especially when it’s one that requires you to move across the globe. I had just gotten off my flight from California and landed here in New Zealand, seeking a fresh start. Walking into my first day on the job, I was a bundle of nerves. However over the course of my semester here, I have found a family through IMU and am so humbled by the opportunity to work with such a great group of guys. Each one of them is extremely dedicated to the work they do, but the team also maintains their admirability as individuals both in and out of the office. Because of this, working for I Measure U has been the perfect environment for me. I’ve not only had the privilege to collaborate with role models in the professional engineering world, but with role models as human beings, which has been such a blessing to me in every way.

I’ve always been passionate about sports. I’ve loved surfing and snowboarding for as long as I can remember, started playing hockey at the age of four, moved onto gymnastics, then somehow found a love for volleyball and have been playing ever since. However, while I’ve been devoted to staying active, being outdoors, and playing sports that have shaped who I am today, I’ve also developed a deep passion for two things on a totally different spectrum - technology and engineering. Through this internship, I have revived my love for learning and enhanced my clarity of thought. This opportunity has exposed me to discover ways that unite concepts you love with engineering, and to use these skills to create applicable devices that can improve the wellbeing of others. It is one thing to hear such a concept iterated repeatedly by professors, but even greater to come to this realization on my own and see how engineering can truly be applied in everyday life. Beyond the scope of the academic world, biomechanics is something that I am really interested in, and could see myself pursuing in the future.

Such an experience with this company is extremely valuable to me as an engineer, because the knowledge I’ve gained through application development for IMU will be extremely beneficial for me as I move forward in the engineering world. Each day I learn something entirely new, both about computer coding and about myself. It’s cool to see the things that I’ve been working on be fully implemented within the company - as you all will be getting a glimpse of the work I’ve done with the Lightning application in the most recent release.

As this blog post comes to an end, along with my time here working with IMU, I’ll miss the jokes and good times we’ve all had in the office, and I look forward to returning to New Zealand in the near future. I will miss this ‘home’ you guys have created for me here at the IceHouse. These words are not even enough to express my gratitude for each and every individual on the IMU Team. Until next time…

[imeasureu]

It’s in the paper!

By Sports Illustrated picked up on an article published by SportTechie about our basketball work in the USA. Read about how our IMU-Step product is being used to both reduce injury, and keep players performing at their best. 

IMeasureU tracks biomechanical load of basketball players

By Logan Bradley

Click here to read the full article.

[imeasureu]

It’s about performance

By Matt Clarke

In pro & collegiate sport the Head Coach is god. Period.

Whether it’s the All Blacks, the Cleveland Cavaliers or Leicester City THE most important question a head coach asks of his or her high performance sports medicine, science and strength & conditioning staff is, ‘how hard can my athletes train / play today?’

It’s a simple question with a complex answer and it’s a problem that we're determined to solve here at IMeasureU (IMU). Good high performance staff capture a large number of data points to substantiate the answer… Great high performance staff synthesize that data and figure out the metrics that truly matter for their sport. Furthermore, they’ve built up enough trust with the head coach that their answer is implicitly trusted and acted on.

In a recent meeting with former All Blacks Rugby World Cup winning coach Sir Graham Henry I asked what was the most important question he asked of his high performance team. His answer, ‘who is available to train today and who are the players we need to modify this training session for?’.

No surprises there.

Sir Graham went on to emphasise the rise and rise, during his 30 odd years coaching Rugby at the highest level, of the high performance team when it comes to critical decision making around player availability and training intensity. Make no mistake the high performance team have a seat at the big table in 2016 and will only become more influential over time.

So how do IMeasureU (IMU) help pro teams answer the big question?

The short answer is:

1.      by accurately measuring ‘unmonitored’ load, over time

2.      precisely measuring readiness to train, right now

So what is ‘unmonitored’ load and why does it matter?

Think about basketball, soccer and tennis for example. Arguably the 3 biggest sports on the planet. The vast majority of training & playing workload that athletes endure in these sports are high intensity movements in a confined space and in the case of basketball and tennis, on a hard surface. A basketball court is 28 x 15 metres (91 x 49 feet). A half tennis court is 12 x 8 metres (39 x 26 feet). A soccer field is 100 x 64 metres which most would consider quite a large area but consider this, up to 80% of soccer workload is small sided games which FIFA recommends are played in areas as little as 12 x 20 metres (29 x 65 feet).

The preferred method of monitoring movement in these games, like most pro sports, is via GPS player trackers such as CatapultSports, StatSports and VXSport. The GPS sensor is placed in between the shoulders typically via a ‘sports bra’ and are designed to track WHERE the body moves, at what speed and at what heart rate. 

More recently GPS trackers have included inertial measurement units to help teams better understand player load. CatapultSports, the global market leader in player monitoring, highlights the importance of inertial measurement on its website which states, ‘If your athletes move like robots from A to B, GPS is for you. If you’re serious about monitoring performance, Inertial Measurement Analysis is your next micro-measurement tool.’ 

Amen to that!

The challenge with GPS single unit sensors, with or without an inertial sensor in them, is they treat the body as a single unit of mass. And us humans are not single units of mass… we have limbs that rotate and bend relative to each other and our bodies.

This is where IMU comes in. We are able to put our miniaturised sensors on different body parts, sync them and then precisely measure, at up to 1000 times per second, HOW the limbs and body move. 

Combine IMU data with GPS data and all of a sudden you have a much clearer measure of the true workload of an athlete. For example, we work with an NBA team where our sensors are placed above each ankle of players. We count and measure the impact of each left and right step. From this step data we can build a more accurate measure of the intensity and hence external load of a basketball training session, drill or game. It’s a similar story with small sided games in Soccer. And with Tennis we can place sensors on a player’s wrist as well as their shins to count & quantify the number of steps, forehands, backhands and serves.

In addition, via our proprietary cumulative bone load algorithm, pro teams also get an internal load metric thus enabling high performance practitioners to better manage high intensity, unmonitored external and internal player load.

Why measuring and managing load matters is a question answered by people much smarter than I am.

Professor Tim Gabbett is a leading applied sports scientist in the area of load measurement and management. He emphasises the importance of training harder & smarter. Many pro teams are successfully implementing Professor Gabbett’s research but to do that precisely they must be able to accurately measure load!

Tim’s paper outlines ways of monitoring training load (‘internal’ and ‘external’ loads) and suggests capturing both recent (‘acute’) training loads and more medium-term (‘chronic’) training loads to best capture a player's training burden. In this paper Tim describes the critical variable—acute:chronic workload ratio—as a best practice predictor of training-related injuries. This provides the foundation for interventions to reduce players risk, and thus, time-loss injuries.

So we know we can use GPS, IMU and RPE (rate of perceived exertion multiplied by length of training session or game) to build an accurate picture of athlete workload over time. That’s well and good but what if you have a squad of 10 pro basketballers or 22 pro soccer players who present to training and a few of them have mentioned in their daily wellness survey that they are a bit sore or didn’t sleep well or feel unwell. How can we objectively test readiness to train / play right now?

Again, people way smarter than myself have and continue to debate the best & most practical way to objectively measure readiness to train.

One of the most commonly accepted ways of quantifying readiness quickly and accurately is via the (vertical) Counter Movement Jump or CMJ for short.  

Per ScienceForSport, 'the CMJ is a simple, practical, valid, and very reliable measure of lower-body power. As a consequence, it is no surprise that this has become a cornerstone test for many strength and conditioning coaches and sports scientists. The CMJ has been shown to be the most reliable measure of lower-body power compared to other jump tests. Furthermore, the CMJ has been shown to have relationships with sprint performances, 1RM maximal strength, and explosive-strength tests. This suggests that performances in the CMJ are linked with maximal speed, maximal strength, and explosive-strength. Contact mats, force platforms, accelerometers, high-speed cameras, and infrared platforms have all been shown to provide a valid and reliable measure of CMJ performance'.

In simple terms athletes stand on the spot with their hand on their hips and jump as high as they can by bending down, at the knees, and jumping up as high as they can. Typically, this is done 3 times with a few seconds break in between. Protocols vary but generally speaking if an athlete is more than 1.2 standard deviations down on their average jump height, take off velocity or there are significant changes (10%+) in the time taken to load (concentric) and de-load (eccentric) their jumps then an intervention is made by the sports medicine, sports science and or strength and conditioning practitioner. That could be a conversation to further qualify the athlete's physical and mental state or a reduction / increase in training volume and intensity. The key with the CMJ protocol for testing readiness to train / play is the difference between an athlete’s metrics today and their long term average. By definition then, whatever the tool used to measure CMJs must be extremely accurate because if there are large variances from jump to jump then how on earth can a practitioner determine if variation is due athlete readiness or the tool itself!?

Other key considerations are mobility & throughput. The best readiness testing tools have to be precise but what’s the point if the tool can’t be used daily when the athletes are playing away from home or are out on the court or field? And if it takes 5 minutes to test 1 athlete and 22 turn up to training at 9am for a 9:30 start how the heck is the high performance coach going to be able to answer the head coach when he or she says, ‘who is available for training today and how hard can I push them?’

IMU are solving this problem with an app we call IMU Ready. By attaching one of our sensors to an athlete’s centre of mass, we are able to quickly & precisely quantify CMJ metrics in real time so high performance teams can make fast and informed calls on player readiness. Believe me when I say building this app did not come easy. It’s taken us many many moons of hard core algorithm testing against Vicon high speed video to deliver the metrics below:

Mean absolute % error height = 2.7% in currnet state

Mean absolute % error peak velocity = 2.3% in current state

Mean absolute % eccentric time = 3.8% in current state

Mean absolute % concentric time = 1.6% in current state

It goes without saying our team will relentlessly seek to improve on these metrics and the sensor and software end user experience. A special and massive thanks to all of our awesome early adopter customers who have helped us design and deliver a user experience that fits seamlessly into their existing athlete readiness workflow.

Clearly I’m biased but in IMU Step and IMU Ready I genuinely believe we’re building a world class, precise, mobile athlete readiness & workload management solution. I think Professor Tim Cable, director of sports performance at Aspetar, sums it up perfectly in this interview (16 minutes in) when he says, and I paraphrase, sports scientists and analysts can deal with all the data but when it boils down to it, they must answer one question, ‘can this player train today at this intensity?’  

If you’re a pro or collegiate Basketball, Soccer, Tennis coach and interested to find out more about how IMU Step & Ready can help you more precisely manage training load, performance & injury prevention, feel free to contact me via directly at [email protected] or via our website http://imeasureu.com/contact.

[imeasureu]

It’s all about timing

By Mark Finch

We all know that the body doesn’t move as one piece. When you go for a run, each leg needs to work independently (but still together) to actually make you move. The ability to run well is a combination of a bunch of things, with one very important factor being your running style, and the coordination between your left and right legs.

Let’s use basketball as an example because that is where our heads are at the moment. Picture a basketball player running down the court to the 3 point line and going up for a jump shot (swish – nothing but net). Now lets look at what we can measure during that movement. Their feet hit the ground with every step as they are running faster and faster down the court. Slowing down towards the 3 point line, they come to a stop and go up for their jump shot. Both feet leave the ground before hitting the court again as they land.  Lets have a look at the data for that process below:

Let me talk you through the data and what it means. It’s kind of cool once you put some context to a bunch of numbers.

We’ve mounted two of our sensors, 1 on the right ankle, 1 on the left ankle, and we are measuring data at 500 samples per second. So as you can imagine, each foot hits the ground during running, and the foot goes from moving through the air to stopping pretty quickly when it hits the ground; we call that slowing down a deceleration (the opposite to acceleration) which is directly measured with the accelerometer. The above plot is the acceleration data from our sensor. The top blue trace is the left leg, and the bottom red is trace is the right leg. Now don’t worry about the signs of the data; we’ve literally just made the red trace negative so that we can compare them easily on the same plot.

With that context we can start trying to understand what’s actually happening. Each of the peaks is when their leg hits the ground while they are running; you can see the peaks getting bigger as they run down the court which shows them speeding up. When when they get to the 3 point line they start to slow down (peaks getting smaller). At about 1391.5 seconds you can see 2 little blips that happen pretty close to each other. This is actually them jumping. You see them take off with those two little blips that happen pretty close together, and you see their landing with the 2 bigger shocks that happen at about the same time at the end of the traces.

You’ll notice I used ‘pretty close together’ and ‘about the same time’ which are pretty vague descriptors. In the world of biomechanics, these terms don’t cut it. Here comes the importance of synchronization – we’ve developed a pretty cool solution that makes sure our sensors are synchronized with each other down to the order of milliseconds! Not only can we see the right and left legs during the run, we actually have the ability to identify which leg they are favoring during the takeoff and landing of their jump! I’ll relive you from your suspense because I know you can’t see the time differences between the legs. The left leg takes off 0.03 seconds before the right leg, however the right leg actually lands 0.006 seconds before the left leg!

How cool is that! Now those are some seriously precise measurements, and a great example of the importance of time synchronization. 

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It's Rocket Science

By Andrew Bollen

Here at I Measure U, we're all about data. How can we measure it? How can we process it? And most importantly, how can we interpret it to give meaningful insights to an athlete or coach? The raw data collected from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on its own is pretty confusing to look at, and really not that useful at first glance. This is where we come in with the magic....

An IMU sensor takes samples of three different physical measurements, in each of the 3 directions of the sensor. The first is the straight line acceleration, or rate of change in speed in that particular direction. The second is the rate of rotation around that axis. The final measurements are the magnetic field strength in that same direction. This gives us a total of nine measurements for every point in time that we measure. Our sensors are able to measure all of these nine metrics at 500 times per second!

To gain helpful insights into the motion of the sensor in the real world, the orientation of the sensor should first be determined, else the measured accelerations are not meaningful. We pass all nine metrics into what we call a ‘fusion algorithm’, which does some complex math to determine this orientation relative to the direction of gravity and magnetic north.

Now that we know the orientation, we can use it to transform the accelerations measured in the constantly changing directions of the sensor, into global or fixed directions. This can then be used to glean more information about the movement of the sensor through space, and ultimately to deliver useful information back to the athlete or coach…. Your jump height is 7cm lower than this time last week. You are favoring heelstrike too much when you run. Your left leg is stronger than your right. You may be experiencing fatigue, and should rest up a while. Useful feedback??? I think so.

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It’s a smart move to start early

By Matt Clarke

Earlier this year, in April, I Measure U was lucky enough to hear about and be given the opportunity to support the inaugural US National Biomechanics Day (NBD). An awesome concept, initiated by Professor Paul DeVita from East Carolina University, and supported by some of our customers such as Professor Irene Davis from Harvard Medical School and Professor Jill McNitt-Gray from the University of Southern California, NBD’s aim is to foster the development of Biomechanics as a standard component in high school curricula across the entire country.

From an education perspective for kids, whether they love sport or not, having a basic understanding of how their bodies move makes sense and is a great foundation for life. But here in Australia where I live, in New Zealand where I grew up and in America, where I work regularly we simply don’t teach kids this stuff… which is weird, given the emphasis these countries place on sport and sports science. It’s a bit like money & finances. We don’t learn about this stuff at school yet understanding it is fundamental to our lives.

Aren’t schools supposed to prepare us for life?

I’m not sure whether they teach biomechanics in Scandinavian schools but I do know they put a huge emphasis on play as the pillar of learning. It’s free-play that gives students the opportunity to develop social competence and I woudl argue movement competence. During these times, they not only rest and recharge; they also learn to cooperate, communicate, and compromise, all skills they need to succeed academically as well as in life. Finland, for example, has a history of producing the highest global test scores in the Western world, as well as a trophy case full of other recent No. 1 global rankings, including most literate nation.

How good would it be if NZ, AU, US and the wider western world allowed our kids to play more and learn more about how their bodies enable them to play!?

In the recent school holidays, my family travelled from Sydney to Brisbane. In the absence of NBD Australia, I decided to take matters into my own hands and took my 5 & 7 year olds to ‘Measure Island’ at the Queensland ‘Sciencentre’ - come to think of it I Measure U and Measure Island – maybe I’ll be able to claim tax on our entry fee!

The point is they absolutely loved learning about the human body and how it works. They were highly engaged for the best part of 3 hours and were able to interact with technology that measured all sorts of things about their bodies.

Although I am somewhat* biased, having loved sport my whole life, the experience with my kids in Brisbane really drove home that enabling kids to learn more about how their bodies work really matters and its most of all its super fun!

When our team found out NBD’s ambition was for every high school kid in America to have the opportunity to learn biomechanics in school, IMU literally jumped (we built an app called IMU Ready that precisely quantifies jump height / take off velocity / concentric + eccentric phase time to help coaches measure athlete's readiness to train) at the chance to get involved by offering our apps to participating universities and high schools for free.

If you’re an American parent, or teacher, or involved in high school, collegiate or even pro sport and you are interested in supporting or participating in NBD 2017, why not reach out to the folks at the kinesiology or biomechanics programs at your local university or get in touch with the NBD organizing committee here.

If you’re a Kiwi or Aussie and interested in getting an NBD off the ground in New Zealand or Australia, please reach out to me at [email protected].                                                          *extremely

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It’s history over the air

By Rakesh Vallabh

Who would have ever thought that inside the IMU sensor is a piece of technology named after a king from over a millennia ago.  I am talking about Bluetooth, named after King Harald "Bluetooth" Blaatand, a famous Danish king of the 10th century, who unified Denmark and Norway, relating to the beginnings of Bluetooth, bought about to unifying the telecommunication and computing industries. It doesn’t stop there though, the Bluetooth logo, the one you see on top of your phone when you are connected to your speaker or car, is actually Harald Bluetooth's initials written in Scandinavian Rune.

Today I am going to explain a little about the technology we use in the IMU sensor to connect to it wirelessly. Bluetooth Low Energy. Or Bluetooth Smart. Or BLE. It has many interchangeable names, but one thing is for certain, it's a popular and I believe, an underestimated technology.  Introduced as part of Bluetooth 4.0 in 2010, it's goal was to create a standard for the emerging IoT (Internet of Things) market. The intention was for these devices run for extended periods of time on very low power, sending small bits of data using very little energy, a departure from the enhanced data rates in Bluetooth 'Classic' that are used to stream audio/video and transfer files etc.

Even though both Bluetooth Classic and BLE use the same 2.4 GHz ISM band to transmit data and can share the same radio antenna, they are not compatible with each other. Recently, while helping a customer of ours connect an IMU to a laptop with Bluetooth dongle, and through later research, this manufacturer hadn't created drivers for BLE, rendering it useless for this purpose.

All BLE devices adhere a Generic Attribute Profile (GATT). The GATT profile is a general specification for sending and receiving short pieces of data known as "attributes" over a BLE link. These profiles are used to discover devices with certain attributes or services, such as Blood Pressure Profile (BLP), Heart Rate Profile(HRP) and Running Speed and Cadence Profile(RSCP). A practical example is the Runkeeper app, which can connect to different heart rate monitors out in the market. The manufacturers don't have to worry about who is consuming the data as long as the adhere to the international standard. Runkeeper, when developing, can build their app to the published specs to instantly get great benefit from adding that feature.

In case you are wondering, there is currently no standard profile or service published to connect and consume Inertial Measurement Data (3/6/9 Axis). There are many advancements in this area, as the BLE standard continues to be updated, the announcement of a low energy specification of WiFi called HaLow, as well as advancement in IoT that make this space truly exciting. We will keep you folks updated.

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It’s a measure of workload.

By Andrew Wong.

Workload. Fatigue. Injury.

These are three problems professional athletes and trainers have faced for decades, with the biggest question being how can you accurately quantify each of them, and leverage that information to optimise training frequency and intensity for maximum performance. This concept spans all sporting codes, from sprinters wanting to run a quicker time to fast bowlers consistently bowling 150+ km/h over a season. Clearly, being injured means that your performance will be diminished, so being able to track and quantify workload and fatigue is imperative for the modern athlete to succeed on the world stage.

As technology has developed, we have been able to measure workload using tools like GPS to measure distance, force plates to measure power and timing gates to measure speed. However, a lot of these tools can sometimes be inaccurate or restrictive in use (Conventional GPS cannot be used indoors, intermittent signal, force plates are very hard to transport, motion capture labs are very expensive, etc). GPS also treats the body as a single unit of mass, whereas we know that when we run and jump and move, our body is using hundreds of muscles and various limbs to do so. So what if we measured those individual limbs that generate motion, and together cumulatively create the action of throwing a ball or jumping a hurdle? Wouldn't this help us paint a more accurate picture of fatigue and workload, by measuring the motion and loading of the important parts of the body?

Enter IMU. Using our sensors we can measure the difference in velocity generation between left and right limbs when sprinting, the loading of the lower limbs when running and jumping on a basketball court, or the difference in angular rotation between spine and shoulder when bowling a cricket ball. All of this information contributes to the workload of an athlete, and until now trainers haven't had the technology that provides the resolution that IMU provides. High fidelity measurements are extremely important to help characterise explosive movements, with our sensor measuring accelerations up to 1000 times per second. It's these micromovements and fast periods of high magnitude loading that all contribute to workload, and being able to measure and quantify those accurately is key.

By aggregating all the information we measure over weeks, months and years we hope to create a very accurate way of determining athlete workloads over a variety of sporting codes. Being able to time synchronise sources of information (e.g. multiple sensors) is also a very important concept, and it's our ability to measure and combine sensor information in real time to create a better understanding of workload that is the real kicker in this problem of injury mitigation and fatigue management through technology.

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It’s an interns point of view

I am Yilin.

I am a person who is full of curiosity, and it is that curiosity which brings me here in New Zealand, the Southern part of the Earth. So I started off my journey with the exploring around the Auckland City.  I can smell the green everywhere even I am in the city, which doesn’t happen much in the place where I came from. Soon after, I started my school at Auckland Uni and made some kiwi friends here. I enjoyed hanging around the beaches with my class folks on Friday night and having cocktails. The work and life are really balanced here in Auckland. People just know how to enjoy their free time here and their activities are very water based. So for people like me who doesn’t know how to swim, I chill on the beach instead and enjoy the views haha. Anyway, the beaches and seas are indeed very beautiful here. 

South Island is always a place I wanted to travel as there is a saying “If you haven’t been to the South Island, you haven’t been to New Zealand”. So that curiosity again brought me to Queenstown in the South Island. I remember my first impression about the South Island is that the mountains are huge, and there are so many of them. Me and my friend did the driving through the mountains and we visited the Milford Sound, Arrow Town etc. The natural views are amazing with no doubts and they are definitely the treasures of New Zealand. 

Apart from the Natural views, I’ve found the food here in New Zealand is equally amazing. The seafood restaurants near the port are awesome. Also, there are so many different kinds of food in Auckland and the prices are good. Comparing with Boston’s food, which has limited varieties and relatively higher price, Auckland is heaven. So I spent most of my meals outside just to try out different restaurants. 

My experience in New Zealand is not just travelling and studying, but also working. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to intern at the IMeasureU corporation. My colleagues are really funny people and the overall working environment is very comfortable. The working pace is perfect for me and I have got touch with different sorts of technical tasks such as making web pages, modifying the sensor’s app. In general, I have really learnt a lot from this internship experience since there are so many chances for me to do the tasks that will actually be applied to the organization or facing towards our customers.

Indeed, I have enjoyed a lot during the past 6 months and the internship opportunity is extremely fresh and helpful to me. Still, I have one more month here to treasure and I am really looking forward to that!

[imeasureu]

It’s great to have interns!

By Mark Finch

We have a great relationship with Boston University and have taken on a number of interns over the last few years. Unfortunately we see our most recent intern leave today. It’s always hard bringing on people knowing that they are going to leave. You have the pros and cons about the time it takes to train them up balanced with the benefit of work that they will output. I can honestly say that we’ve had a great run of interns over the years. It’s a bit of a unique opportunity for them - as a startup we have the problem that we always have way too much work for the resources that we have on hand. So we’ve kind of built a bit of a philosophy around the work our interns do - everything they do is real and will ultimately be implemented into the IMU framework. It’s great for them because everything they do actually gets used in the company. It’s risky for us because we’re reliant on the output of a temporary resource that has very little prior knowledge around IMU.

It’s always great to hear the stories come back to us. I actually just heard today, from our first intern Bobby, who got a full time job in the US - his employer actually called me as one of his referees, so it’s great to see it all coming full circle. Congrats Bobby!

So today, it’s sad to say that it’s Yilin’s last day. She’s done some really great work and we’re going to miss her smiley face around the office. You guys will actually be reaping the rewards of her work very soon when we release an update for our Lightning app with a number of feature requests you guys have made.

[imeasureu]

It’s the Deep End

By Andrew Bollen

Biomechanical soft tissue modelling. The complex physiology of the heart and nervous system. The history behind today's medical devices regulatory environment. These were all components of the engineering degree that led me here to IMU. With my graduation ceremony taking place just a few weeks ago, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on my time at the University of Auckland (UoA) training as a Biomedical Engineer, and the process of "jumping in the deep end" since.

Haven't heard of a Biomedical Engineer? Maybe today is a good day to meet one :). Not only I, but also Mark and Andy have trained in this same discipline, so it is certainly a well established position in the company. The UoA decribes it as "the application of principles and techniques from the physical and engineering sciences to medical and biological problems", which I think is pretty accurate. We touch on a wide range of topics and skills both theoretical and practical, and learn how to apply these to medical and biological related problems.

So for 4 years it was head down, tail up as I pushed through the study. That all changed on November the 27th when I first met Mark and Andy to talk about launching into my career with IMU. So how has life changed since?

You don't see it at the time, but it is not the complex partial differential equations that pay off in the real world, but the soft skills built almost subconsciously along the journey. My time at university taught me how to learn. How to work in a team. How to think about a problem.  

University was safe. A great incubator and a great place of learning, but not the real world. Now in the workplace... Deadlines matter. Customers are eager. Money is a real thing. The world is a bigger place than the student commons. I can't always expect Google to have the answer. Mistakes can be costly.

If there's one thing I've learnt so far, it's that I have the ability to both add, and subtract value from the company. It's that sense of responisibility that is the difference between Uni and work, I think. Still learning every day, too. Thats the beauty of it. Life in the deep end.

So there's a bit more about me. Haven't met the rest of the team yet? Pop over to our team page and take a look!

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It’s a Start-up... Baby!

By Matt Clarke

As I mentioned on a previous post, 6 months ago I joined sports wearable and analytics start-up IMeasureU. Combining my experience in tech with my passion for sport and all things New Zealand felt like the perfect fit. Still does. I consider myself fortunate to get up in the morning and genuinely enjoy what I do and be around like-minded team members and customers who love sport as much as I do. Speaking of mornings, perfect and fit… 1 month ago I had my 3rd child. Maybe it’s the cumulative lack of sleep but it occurred to me that having a baby is a lot like being in a start-up. I discussed this with my partner and she agreed (caveat – she has had far less sleep than I have). In essence start-ups are about being able to thrive in and embrace uncertainty. You have to be passionate enough about solving a problem that you are resilient to the discovery (product & customer) process that is finding product-market fit. Nobody lacks passion for their baby’s welfare and the same can be said of their start-up. The more I think about it babies & start-up businesses are kinda the same. Each ‘baby’ is different and has its own characteristics and nuances and its only via an ongoing set of experiments – she likes to settle in this position and drink this much at this time and have this much sleep in this period and have her bath then etc – that we LEARN our way to what works a.k.a ‘product-market fit’ in start-up parlance

Using the Customer Development process along with the business model canvas first developed by Alexander Osterwalder, I thought it would be kinda fun to assemble a detailed version of a ‘start-up baby!’ that includes the nine important elements of a successful business.                                                       As customers/family embrace or reject elements of the business model, we iterate and pivot our model over time based on their feedback! Enter the ‘Start-Up Baby!’ Model by Matt Clarke 1. Value Proposition: Business: the product/service, its features and benefits or uniqueness vs. competition; size of the market opportunity; and the MVP or minimum viable product that best illustrates the product as quickly as possible to elicit customer feedback early Baby: the person, their personality & appearance, volume of their scream at night, minimum viable cuteness for baby, minimum viable sleep for founders 2. Customer Segments: Business: who your customer is and what problems the product solves Baby: who the parents are and what problems they can solve as individuals & together 3. Channels: Business: how you’ll distribute and sell your product Baby: how many siblings, grandparents and friends can you get to babysit 4. Customer Relationships: Business: how you’ll create demand Baby: demand is strong early but how will you create and sustain a pipeline of babysitters past 3 months 5. Cost Structure: Business: the fixed and variable costs required to operate your business Baby: good luck trying to keep both the variable & fixed costs down over time! 6. Key Activities: Business: the tasks the company must perform to succeed Baby: the tasks the parents must perform to stay sane 7. Key Resources: Business: suppliers, commodities, or other essential elements of the business Baby: see 3 above 8. Key Partners: Business: other enterprises essential to success of the business Baby: date nights 9. Revenue Streams: Business: revenue and profit sources and size Baby: see 5 above

So what do you think of my model, is having a baby like starting a business!?

[imeasureu]

It’s a W.I.P

By Rakesh Vallabh

Launching IMU Benchmark Beta to some of our closest clients was an awesome milestone. A large focus was to get Benchmark into users' hands. I thought I would take the time to jot down a few things we have learnt so far.

When people use the app, there is always 3 things in play. The athlete, the sensor and what activity they were doing. In our case, the activity was on counter-movement jumps. When we watched people using our app, it was quickly evident that we hadn't put the athlete front and centre enough. The activity they were doing or sensor they had attached were always second fiddle to which athlete was performing the task.  We are currently iterating on some new designs and I hope to get the new designs out shortly.

Our algorithm is awesome in the lab and the lads have done an awesome job but a lot goes on in the real world. We noted data loss, different jump techniques and different placements of the sensor resulting in unreliable jump heights. Things like a leg flick and use of arms to propel the jumper higher (opposed to hands on hips). We even saw the flutter of a salmon going upstream as people jump. They were trying to use their hips to propel them higher making for comical times. All of this adversely affected the repeatability of the jump results.

We also noted that when testing, having a jump counter or timer would have made life easier when someone was doing the jumps, as well as the ability to capture video. Being able to look at technique would be super helpful when we analyse incoming data, and also for coaches and athletes when looking at technique.

The ability to compare jump sessions with previous sessions between the same athlete and multiple athletes was also feedback that we received. We are currently on the job of getting that ready.

These are just some of the feedback we have received and discovered. Long story short, you can't produce a baby in one month by making nine women pregnant.

[imeasureu]

It's Time to Nerd Up

By Andrew Wong

This week I have been doing a lot of analysis into the biomechanics of jumping. So, I decided to write about it - because what it all boils down to is cool maths, and believe it or not, maths is super cool.

Let's focus on the high jump. Now when trying to do a really high jump, we essentially want to move our body as high as possible by generating as much kinetic energy as possible. That's physics talk for trying really really hard.

But what happens after you leave the ground? You have done all the work launching off the ground, and there are no more forces acting upon you except for gravity. You might think everything is out of your control, you are just a flailing object falling through the air. HOWEVER - there IS something you can do...

Enter the Fosbury Flop. The Fosbury Flop is where you jump over the bar facing the sky, curving your body so that you kind of sling over it and land on the other side. But how does this make you jump higher? Isn't the height already dictated with how hard you pushed off the ground? Well, once you've left the ground, your body mass - specifically your centre of mass - already has it's trajectory planned, most likely a parabola. However, it is possible to move your body OUTSIDE of this trajectory. By curving up, your body will rise above your centre of mass and hopefully clear the bar.

This side-on diagram summarises it pretty well. Let's say the black curve is your body, the cross is your centre of mass and the red dot is the bar. As you can see, your centre of mass doesn't even NEED to clear the bar for YOU to get over it! So, next time you're jumping a particularly large fence (for whatever reason...), don't flail - Fosbury. Just hope the landing isn't a flop.

Extras for you maths lovers and where I got the diagram!

[imeasureu]

It’s all about Focus. Mark your calendars.

By Mark Finch

Hey team, Mark here checking in.

As you may have noticed our focus has changed quite a bit over the last year. This time last year we were focused around getting our crowd-funding campaign together, which was the last part of our Market Validation around the IMU-Run solution that we had been working on. As you know, the crowdfunding campaign was unsuccessful, which in reflection, turned out to be blessing in disguise.  Anyway, we went back to the drawing board to understand why it failed and it came down to really understanding the value that we provide, but more importantly what type of people/professions/groups would pay for that value.

Over the last 6-12 months we spent a lot of time talking to the market understanding their problems, their needs, building strategy, and refining focus. It’s been a long process but we can finally say that we’ve got a very clear and refined focus around what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, who we’re doing it for, and where we’re going. The focus is on Professional Sports. 

On a more personal note, I had a moment of nostalgia when I was putting together the ‘momentum slide’ of our pitch deck. I was summarising the sequence of events that have gotten us to where we are now and and had to step back and just appreciate everything that we’ve done. It’s been 8 years of blood, sweat, and tears and I just want to say, I have loved every moment of it. I love what I do, and couldn’t done it without all the people who have been (and still are!!) a part of our journey. This company is built on passion, and you have all been a part of it in one way or another.

Anyway, yep we’re putting a pitch deck together, which means it’s time to make our vision happen; It’s funding time! We’ve already started conversations with a small number of investors and groups around raising capital and will be pitching at a local investor evening in May. So Mark your calendars, and stay tuned to what happens over the next couple months as our funding journey progresses.

So for me, right now, it’s all about focus. 

[imeasureu]

It’s a Labour of Love.

By Andrew Bollen

Hey everybody, great to have you back! It’s all go here at IMeasureU, and it has been a crazy last few weeks in the office with a strong focus on manufacturing. Last Friday we popped a pile of precious cargo on a one-way flight to the US, to measure running impacts in the Boston Marathon. With a tight deadline looming, it was “all hands on deck” to unpack, setup, test, charge, test some more, glue, assemble, and repackage 300 sensors, ready for use straight out of the box. Made with love <3.

We have received news that they have arrived safe and sound, and are super excited to see them used on the international stage. The Boston marathon is the longest standing annual marathon in the world, so it’s exciting to be a part of this historic event. We hope it will lead to great new insights for the Harvard University research team conducting the study.

Stay tuned for more on the marathon study. I Measure Boston!

Here’s a quick timelapse of the team at work. #Clockwork

You may notice the absence of me, the blog writer….. Well, while these guys were slaving away here at the office, I had my own little labour of love going on. Starting with IMeasureU a few months ago opened the door for me to marry my lovely wife. Brilliantly timed to coincide with the Boston sensor build, it was a fantastic day, and a great week away for the honeymoon. Now back in Auckland, and I’m super excited to be back with the team, loving the work I do.

The super exciting news for me is that my engineering internship has come to an end, and I have been offered a full time contract with the company. It’s been a fantastic journey so far, and I’m super grateful to the IMeasureU team for welcoming me in so well. I look forward to being a part of the company's exciting future that we are building together. Onwards and upwards!

So there you go. It’s a labour of love on all fronts.

IMU. Arohanui.

[imeasureu]

It’s Personal.

By Matt Clarke

When I was a kid I wanted to be a professional athlete. First it was as a squash player, then later, when I realised I had about as many fast twitch fibres as Donald Trump has scruples, it was as a triathlete. At 18 I moved from Auckland to Christchurch for University and immersed myself in Dr John Helleman’s NZ Triathlon Institute.

Swim, Bike, Run. Swim, Bike, Run some more. Swim, Bike, Run harder. Rinse & Repeat. Loved it. Got 2nd in NZ Junior Champs and qualified for Worlds after only 6 months in the sport. Then I got injured. It’s hard to understate the pain of injury for a serious athlete. It’s not just about physical pain & rehabilitation, it’s about anxiety, letting down my family, friends, team mates, depression, helplessness, loneliness, loss of purpose, what if I can’t compete again.

For me back then (early-mid ‘90s) my motto was if it hurts its good. Just muscle up and go harder. Don’t get me wrong, resilience and intestinal fortitude are critical to being an elite athlete but so is learning and back then I just didn’t have the tools, data or mindset to constantly be learning about how my body was adapting (or not) to the heavy training loads I was giving it. To be an elite triathlete you more or less need to be able to represent your province or state in swimming, cycling and running but it’s a very delicate balance managing fatigue vs fitness. In fact, in most pro sports the holy grail is finding that balance between volume and intensity of fatigue to maximise fitness whilst minimising injury risk. Fundamentally you seek to stress the body with stimulus (preferably sport specific) then recover at a subsequent higher fitness level.

When I was introduced to IMU 6 months ago it immediately appealed to me as a practical, mobile tool that captured precise, science-driven data that helps athletes identify fatigue, benchmark their power / speed and better manage their training workload. My mind went straight back to 1994 and the knee injury that essentially prevented me from doing the training I needed to do to compete on the world stage.

Would IMU have predicted my injury? No.

Would IMU prevented my injury? Maybe.

Would IMU have reduced my injury risk? Yes.

Would IMU have helped me understand I was a Triathlete not a Squash player? For sure.

Would IMU given me daily insight into my readiness to train / race? Definitely!

You get the picture. For me, IMU is personal. Since giving up my dream of being a professional sportsman myself I’ve always had a ‘rock under my towel’ when lying on the beach over summer. The opportunity to combine my passion for sport with my 20 years of experience in software and help athletes achieve their dreams gets rid of that rock.