From injury to diet to age verification; how AI is reshaping Indian athletes' training

From dietary recommendations to injury predictions and from age verification to psychological mapping -- Artificial Intelligence is set to become a force of change in Indian sports with a centralised data management system that would not just customise training but also track athletes progress like never before.

From dietary recommendations to injury predictions and from age verification to psychological mapping -- Artificial Intelligence is set to become a force of change in Indian sports with a centralised data management system that would not just customise training but also track athletes' progress like never before. At the Sports Ministry's National Centre for Sports Science and Research (NCSSR) here, India's first Athlete Management and Sports Science platform has been developed and put into operation. It covers the elite athletes vigorously for now but is intended to penetrate the junior-most level going forward so that ''catch them young'' becomes a planned reality of Indian sports. It allows coaches and sports science experts to track the smallest details of an athlete's day, right down to the quantity of their lemon water intake or the number of soaked almonds consumed in the morning. It's a platform developed by NASSCOM Deeptech startup Darwin, incubated with IIT Bombay, which is also a shareholder in the company. Designed ''specifically for Indian training needs'', SPEEED AI (Sports Performance Enhancement and Evaluation through Digitization) has myriad data from Sports Authority of India's (SAI) 14 National Centres of Excellence (NCOE), covering over 6000 athletes right now. Every NCOE head has access to the data of the athletes based there while the collated information is available only to the top leadership of NCSSR in Delhi. ''We want to map everything from the baseline, whether it is wrist strength, shoulder strength, or postural balance because only then we start the training in areas where there is scope for improvement,'' NCSSR head Brigadier (Retd) Bibhu Kalyan Nayak told PTI at the centre, which held a workshop on sports sciences in precision disciplines (shooting and archery) just last week. Nayak has previously served as the head of International Hockey Federation's (FIH) Health and Safety Committee, was in-charge of the Safdarjung Hospital's Sports Injury Centre and travelled with the Indian contingent to the Tokyo Olympics as its Medical Officer during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. He took over as NCSSR's first head in 2022 and can barely hide his excitement while talking about the possibilities that AI will open up. ''Through AI, it would be easier to track injuries, even predict injuries. For instance there are 300 archers at a SAI centre and the maximum risk of injury is say a wrist issue. ''We will zero it down to which centre has the maximum wrist issues, accordingly we can ask strength and conditioning staff to look at why there are so many of such cases in that particular centre. ''Data will give you actionable inputs and that helps in taking right decisions,'' he asserts. Early detection of injury risk would not just reduce downtime to prevent loss of training days but also enhance athlete longevity. The company that has developed the platform, promising a 360 degree Athlete Performance System, says the biggest benefit would be injury detection and management. ''Niggles like minor inflammation are always a good indicator of what might happen next. The Drona dashboard stores such inputs to give an indication on what might happen next and since the information is centralised, it allows for preemptive action instead of waiting for something to go wrong at a bigger scale,'' Darwin CEO Rahul Bajaj told PTI while showcasing the system that would soon have chat bot 'Akshay' helping athletes plan their warm-up routines if needed. Bajaj says SPEEED is inspired by Australia's Smartabase system that was created back in 2003 for sports analytics in that country and later found takers even in the USA. ''Our system is inspired by Smartabase but evolves as per changing technology. Also the sensitive health and personal data of our athletes remains in India, not parked in servers somewhere in the US. Data safety is already a major concern everywhere,'' Bajaj said. ''Ours is a role-based access control where complete information is available only at the very top level in SAI and Sports Ministry to ensure data privacy,'' he added. The injury prediction system relies on analysing something as minute as joint angles. ''AI evaluates acute versus chronic workload to identify high-risk fatigue zones. Early Warning System like a subtle gait and movement changes are detected before minor stress escalates into serious injury,'' said Arun Navani, head of sports tech firm A2S Edge that is also working with SAI to enhance its AI mechanisms for injury management. An unintended positive consequence of such scrutiny is the strengthening of anti-doping mechanisms, according to the experts. ''On SPEEED, athletes can upload prescriptions and know what might be a banned drug. Since our AI assistant Drona is built entirely on SAI-verified data, it won't crawl around the web to may be end up giving misleading information. That's a huge safeguard against AI hallucination,'' said Bajaj. Tackling Age fraud ============= Age fraud has been a bane of Indian sports for decades now with manipulation of paper records being rampant despite the introduction of The Tanner-Whitehouse 3 (TW3) test, that assesses skeletal maturity to verify age. The AI-driven age verification system promises to automate TW3 methods for ''highly accurate growth-plate assessment.'' ''Continuous tracking of physical development highlights abnormal growth patterns. The outcome is creation of a Verified Biological Age (VBA) system to support fair competition and transparent scouting,'' said Navani.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)