SportFX<\/a>, a smartphone-based biomechanics assessment that serves as the foundation for personalized coaching recommendations. The app is starting with baseball and softball but intends to expand across a range of sports.<\/p>\n\u201cMy favorite part of managing was seeing young players have success and the light come on, realizing that they could do it,\u201d said Girardi, whose son, Dante, is the company\u2019s VP\/Baseball Operations. \u201cWe\u2019re an additive. We want to assist coaches and parents in coaching their children.\u201d <\/p>\n
The founding story can be traced to an experience by NurivaTech CEO Joseph Caruso, a serial entrepreneur who grew frustrated trying to make improvements in his golf game with a TrackMan launch monitor. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll this data, all these numbers, it\u2019s not really getting into my brain, and it\u2019s definitely not getting into my hands and [how I] feel,\u201d Caruso said. \u201cSo I just blurted out a statement, \u2018How do I just talk to my game directly?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The resulting AI coach is called Winston after the Pulp Fiction character Winston Wolfe who famously said, \u201cI solve problems.\u201d SportFX tracks 23 points on the body at 120 frames per second with what it says is accuracy within a half-degree. (They tested the software against the Qualisys system at the Wake Forest Pitching Lab.)<\/p>\n
While many motion capture tools apply pre-existing pose estimation libraries onto video, CTO Eli Robles said SportFX extracts its own 3D coordinates from every frame. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey estimate, they infer, they give you their best guesses based on pattern matching with their training data,\u201d Robles said. \u201cAnd we measure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Results currently take a few minutes to process, but Robles shared that a real-time mode is in development, as is the ability to track ball flight. <\/p>\n
SportFX is available via monthly ($16 or $30) or yearly subscription ($100) following a free trial. Caruso said it was important to keep the price point as accessible as possible, as compared to more traditional lab-based biomechanics evaluations.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the founding ethos — and what really lights our collective souls on fire inside the company — is that, historically, the cost of youth athletics continues to skyrocket,\u201d he said. \u201cFor young people — girls, guys — for their dreams, to be stuck behind a paywall really upset me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NurivaTech, a sports computer vision and AI startup, has raised $8M in seed funding with backing from several…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[254,169428,64,63,4034,591,14767,85],"class_list":["post-559153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-athlete-performance","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-softball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}