Northampton Saints has teamed up with Servita and Google Health to beta trial Edo, an innovative athlete performance tool.
The technology leverages the latest Fitbit by Google wearables to provide real-time statistics directly to players, coaches and performance staff.
Edo’s programme aims to provide a holistic view of each player’s health data, enabling coaches to proactively identify any anomalies in a player’s typical vitals, and make informed decisions about training regimens, dietary adjustments and player ‘readiness’.
Matt Lee, Head of Medical at Northampton Saints, explained: “We are very excited to have joined up with Servita and Google, with an aim to drive the Edo platform to optimise our training sessions and match preparation.
“We want to leave no stone unturned to improve as a team, and a key element of that is in areas such as recovery and rehabilitation.
“With our squad kitted out with Fitbits, over the last few months we have provided feedback and worked together with Servita and Google to produce a dashboard which assimilates a number of different streams of data – such as sleep and recovery scores, GPS statistics, and mouthguard information – to create a more rounded view on a player’s wellbeing.
“We are confident this will help us to make improvements in how we manage our players, and so we are very optimistic about the benefits Edo can provide for Saints over the season ahead.”
Matt Lee, Head of Medical at Saints
Edo provides a picture of player readiness, potential overexertion, and sleep metrics that can help to indicate injury risks. The platform runs side-by-side player comparisons, looking at their comparative metrics and run time-series analysis to look at individual player biomarkers.
With 33 players onboarded since Summer 2023, Edo has now tracked nearly 8k hours of SPO2 data and over 9k hours of HRV data. During this time it has received nearly 65k updates and generated 13 health alerts.
Rich Story, Managing Director at Servita said: “Through continuous feedback from Northampton Saints, we have been able to refine 'Edo' and tailor it to their needs, with features like automated anomaly detection, player and team-wide readiness and sleep score compilation, plus the ability to compare vitals across players or timeframes. This exercise has so far proven to be hugely valuable in the way we are able to understand what club coaching and performance staff want in terms of actionable insights.”
The wealth of data provided by Northampton Saints’ participation in Edo’s development will reveal key behavioural patterns that influence player performance, allowing coaches to offer targeted guidance and support.
Aideen O'Colmain, Product Consultant at Google Health highlighted the future potential for Edo: “With the introduction of AI and Machine Learning to aid positive behaviour change we can further optimise individual and squad performance identifying behaviours that drive success, and predicting or detecting areas of concern. This will help revolutionise squad preparation.”
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