An exhaustive data collection and analysis process drives insights that underpin all of the NFL's health and safety work. That process is much more extensive than simply counting injuries.
The league's unprecedented data collection includes information that all 32 clubs enter into a centralized injury data base, the Electronic Medical Record, or EMR, combined with data sourced from dozens of camera angles and thousands of hours of game footage and gathered from innovative technology, including sensors in mouthguards, helmets, and shoulder pads.
The NFL uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, including those developed by Zebra Technologies, embedded within equipment to collect information on which piece of equipment – including the component parts of each, from a helmet's chin strap to its facemask – players are wearing. As soon as players step out of the locker room and onto the field, the tags are activated by radio waves that send data to a central digital inventory management system. This data is collected for every player, for every practice and every game.
"Zebra's RFID tags are attached to players' shoulder pads and in footballs to transmit real-time location data to gather metrics such as player speed, distance traveled, orientation and acceleration," said John Pollard, vice president of business development, Zebra Technologies. "The collaboration between the NFL and Zebra is driving insights that can help keep players safe."
Mouthguard sensors are also collecting head kinematic data—like how fast and in what direction a player's head moves within a helmet. They help the league to collect more information than ever before about the duration and direction of head impacts players experience based on their positions, both during practices and games.
All this sensor data is taken together with field surface information, weather-related variables, workload and performance data, and video review, including review of more than 1,000 concussion-causing impacts broken down into 150 variables and frame-by-frame review of all major injuries to collect information on pose, behavior, play type, speed, equipment, forces, and more.
The data is so precise that the NFL's engineers can analyze it position-by-position to develop insights into exactly what types of impacts players are most likely to experience and then work directly with helmet manufacturers to share these learnings so that they can design position-specific equipment to better protect against those impacts.