UPDATED 21:10 EDT / DECEMBER 06 2019

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AWS will call the signals for the NFL’s data-driven player safety initiative

Injury rates for players in the National Football League have been going up, and the organization has turned to tech for help in doing something about it.

On Thursday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell joined Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy on the re:Invent stage in Las Vegas to announce a partnership between the two organizations. The league will use AWS cloud services to gather and evaluate health information from players and extract data from video images to anticipate injuries before they occur.

“We’ve had as many as 17 people looking at videos,” said Jeff Crandall (pictured), chair of the National Football League Engineering Committee. “We’ve looked at more than 100,000 helmet impacts manually, and there’s got to be a better way. We actually spent two years talking with tech companies, exploring what was out there, before we came to this AWS partnership.”

Crandall spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event. They discussed how AWS will help the league monitor risk factors for its athletes and the various data sources that contribute to that effort. (* Disclosure below.)

Wealth of data

To examine how a mass of data being gathered from the football field translates into the way players perform, train, or become injured, the NFL will apply Amazon’s artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, and computer-vision capabilities to create a “Digital Athlete.” This computer-simulated player will model scenarios to help target potential risk situations.

“We have so much data that we’re able to create an evaluation of what’s happening to the players and what they’re experiencing,” Crandall explained. “By having that, we can come up with something called the Digital Athlete, which is essentially a virtual representation. Through that virtual representation we start to understand how any of these factors influence the dimensions of performance and injury.”

The NFL has been utilizing AWS since 2017 for cloud and machine learning to power Next Gen Stats. This data-gathering platform provides real-time information on speed, location and acceleration for all players in every game.

“It’s a very fast, dynamic game, so you have to have a number of data sources coming in,” Crandall said. “Very few other sports or applications have that level of quantification.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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