Analytics app helps reduce sports injuries

Podium has used OutSystems to create an injury insight platform being provided to schools and clubs across the UK free of charge. The platform is designed to help teachers, coaches, and sports medics to log and monitor sports-related injury data in 11- to 18-year-olds. This important data, which is currently unavailable, delivers greater oversight over the volume of sporting activity being undertaken by young people and any injuries that they sustain.

The captured data is anonymised, gathered in a secure data lake, and made available to researchers within the Podium Analytics Institute for Youth Sports Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford, who will deploy the latest AI and modelling techniques to identify causes of injury, how to reduce the long-term impact of injury, as well as potential preventative measures against injury.

Podium established that a mobile app would be the most effective method for capturing details of sports injuries sustained by athletes. With its cloud-first, cloud-native, multi-cloud strategy, Podium selected OutSystems for its ability to build high-performance apps quickly and within sight of the intended users, ensuring that their feedback could be incorporated on-the-fly. While it would have taken approximately four months to develop a mobile app with the depth of capability Podium required, OutSystems was able to fast-track the process to create one in six weeks.

Podium also recognised OutSystems ability to scale as the apps and user needs evolved, and to iterate quickly and at pace with the development team’s demands. A further advantage of OutSystems is that it gave Podium the option to offer users different ways of capturing the data, from entering it manually via a device’s screen or keypad, using speech recognition as an interface, to video upload. By simplifying the process for logging information about the injury in real time, Podium will be able to analyse the data and create interventions, insights, advice and training programmes that aim to minimise future injuries, while also improving the return-to-play process for those recovering from injury. 

Commenting on its decision to use OutSystems, Damian Smith, Chief Technology Officer of Podium Analytics, said: “We are delighted to have partnered with OutSystems. While there are many app development platforms available, OutSystems stands apart for marrying ease of use with enterprise grade capabilities. We have been able to develop an app which is simple to use and powerful enough to capture the breadth of data we need in order to reduce injury in sport. OutSystems enables us to fail fast and iterate quickly, which has helped to dramatically speed up the pace at which we can make a difference on the ground.”   

OutSystems pioneered the low-code category, having introduced its first platform in 2002. Since then, the company has amassed a global install base comprising high-performance development teams who are building mission-critical applications designed specifically for their business. OutSystems customers span large enterprises to small- and medium-sized businesses across nearly all industries – from banking and manufacturing to energy and healthcare.

Colin Ferguson, OutSystems’ Regional Vice President, UK&I, added: “OutSystems is proud to be part of this ground-breaking initiative centred on understanding more about sports injuries – why they happen and how to reduce them. This particular application is a shining example of how OutSystems enables high-performance apps to be created and amended quickly during the development process to result in one that’s easy to use both on and off the sports field.”

Podium’s Injury Insight platform will be live in 200 schools and 250 sports clubs by the end of the 22/23 Academic Year.