The NFL ‘Digital Athlete’ program will place computer-generated players in simulations using Amazon’s AI tools to understand how injuries happen
- Amazon will build a new computer simulation of football for the NFL
- The program, called ‘Digital Athlete’ will simulate games millions of times
- These simulations will be based on real video feeds of NFL games
- The simulations will be used to learn more about injuries and test rule changes
Today, the NFL announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services to develop a set of software tools to try and predict what causes player injuries.
Called ‘Digital Athlete,’ the program will insert a computer created player into millions of simulated games to generate recommendations about changing player equipment, altering the game’s rules, and minimizing injuries in certain scenarios.
The program will use Amazon’s Regoknition system to break down video feeds from current NFL games and record information about everything from play selection, weather, playing surface, and player position.
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Amazon and the NFL will partner on a new program called ‘Digital Athlete,’ and AI-driven simulation of millions of games using a computer-created player to learn more about player injuries
Amazon’s SageMaker software will also be used to build machine learning models to apply that data as the basis to simulate new variations on individual plays and entire games.
‘When we apply next-generation technology to advance player health and safety, everyone wins – from players to clubs to fans,’ NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
‘The outcomes of our collaboration with AWS – and what we will learn about the human body and how injuries happen – could reach far beyond football.’
The NFL first partnered with Amazon in 2017 to use its AI tools to track real-time stats about player acceleration, top speed, and position on the field, which is used during broadcasts.
The NFL hopes the ‘Digital Athlete’ will be able to generate similarly comprehensive stats about how and why concussions occur during games.
In 2016, the NFL acknowledged a relationship between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head.
The ‘Digital Athlete’ program will collect data from NFL video feeds and collect data about as many different variables as possible, then incorporate them into its simulation to see how many different ways any given play could have gone
Over time CTE can impair normal brain function, reduce cognitive ability and lead to a number of other health complications, including depression, dementia, and memory loss.
Earlier this year, the NFL announced it had made significant progress in reducing the number of concussions players suffered during the season.
Concussions dropped by 24 percent between the 2017 and 2018 seasons, going from 281 to 214.
Some health experts cautioned against reading too much into those figures.
Dr, Lee E. Goldstein, MD, PhD from Boston University argued that CTE can be caused by repeated sub-concussive blows over a sustained period of time, even without any one blow rising to the level of a concussion.
‘’That tells us nothing about what’s happening to the cumulative, repetitive head injuries associated with this – and not just football, but other sports and outside sports,’ Goldstein said in an interview.
‘It’s a health problem.’’
