As youth sports participation increases there is more single sport focus at a younger age. Seasons and practices have lengthened and the young developing athlete is not given adequate time to rest and is often prone to overuse injuries. Ever emerging research continues to stress pitch counts, practice limits, and rest.
2 Rice University Students, Senthil Natarajan and Alex Dzeda, recently developed a “baseball sleeve” to alert you to potential arm injuries. Tommy John surgery (ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction), rotator cuff tears, and labral tears are a few of the injuries pitchers can develop. Their startup company, Ziel Solutions, developed a sleeve which, “It has sensors that can track and monitor your muscle activity and your motion through accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and electromyography,” Natarajan said in an interview with SportTechie.”
They hope to collect data to determine players at risk for injury so they can receive the care they need to prevent injury. They are currently planning beta tests with local high school and college teams. The real time data collected will be sent via Bluetooth to an app which will analyze for risks. Preventing youth sports injuries should be a major focus of research and it’s good to see young people utilizing there talents for this. Read about there story in the article below.
