The assessment covers seven simple movements — various lunges, jumps and timed balances — and produces a player score relative to the rest of the league and the player’s own history. The report also includes “jump” and “landing strategy” metrics that chart the distribution of force across a player’s hips, knees and ankles, and it translates arcana like “max ankle dorsification angle” into the lingua franca of basketball: “how small your ankle angle can get like when you get low on a quick first step.” The file, which a player can access throughout his career, regardless of team, is meant to give him information about how hard he can push his body — and, just as critically, when it’s time to ease off.
“When you’re younger, there’s days you can take as many — for us — baseball swings as you want,” New York Yankees first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, who is 38, told me. We were talking in mid-February at the team’s spring training facility in Tampa, Fla., as he was getting ready for eight straight months of baseball. “As you get older, there’s times when rest is more important than work.”
For some athletes, the right biometric data presented in the right context represents “permission to rest,” says Ana Montero, a co-founder of Atlas, a San Francisco-based company that makes brain-wave-scanning, behind-the-ear wearables about the size of Mentos candies. “It’s quantifiable evidence that is showing you: Dude, today — or right now — is not the day. Go to the gym, go for a walk, go for whatever it is. And then coming back and actually seeing that you’ve bounced back.”
The Atlas device gathers several types of data, including electroencephalography, or EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, and galvanic skin response, or G.S.R., which is what a polygraph test measures. That data is sorted into five categories (among them agility, vitality and stress) and then delivered with advice through a smartphone app.
“There’s always some noise in brain activity because neurons are not perfect chips or transistors,” André Marques-Smith, Atlas’s other co-founder, says. “So mistakes get made.” He adds that what causes neurons to lose their precision are things that we’re all familiar with: fatigue, stress, anxiety, hunger, aging. Tom Ryan, the N.B.A.’s senior vice president of basketball strategy, says Launchpad chose Atlas because it was eager to find a device that collected this sort of data in real time. If it works the way it’s supposed to, then a vet like Goldschmidt will know exactly when he’s good for some extra batting practice and when he should take a nap instead.
