Amazon and NFL to develop the Digital Athlete platform to prevent injuries

“The NFL is committed to reimagining the future of football. When we apply next-generation technology to advance player health and safety, everyone wins – from players to clubs to fans. The outcomes of our collaboration with AWS – and what we will learn about the human body and how injuries happen – could reach far beyond football. As we look ahead to our next 100 seasons, we’re proud to partner with AWS in that endeavor.” – NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“By leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, the NFL is growing its leadership position in driving innovation and improvements in health and player safety, which is good news not only for NFL players, but also for athletes everywhere. This partnership represents an opportunity for the NFL and AWS to develop new approaches and advanced tools to prevent injury, both in and potentially beyond football.” – Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.

This expanded relationship addresses one of the league’s most important priorities – working to develop the technologies and solutions to improve player health and safety. With AWS, the league will be able to securely speed the gathering and application of data-based insights using scalable computer simulation and modeling. AWS and the NFL will use AWS’s analytics and ML services, including the Amazon ML Solutions Lab (AWS’s Machine Learning Professional Services program) and Amazon SageMaker, which enables data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy ML models, to develop the capabilities that may be able to help predict and prevent injury to athletes.

Among the new tools and technologies AWS and the NFL will co-develop is the “Digital Athlete” platform, a computer simulation model of an NFL player that will be able to be used to model infinite scenarios within the game environment without any risk to the athletes. The Digital Athlete will apply AWS’s AI, ML, and computer vision technologies, including Amazon Rekognition, to the NFL’s data sets from numerous sources – including historical and current video feeds, player position, play type, equipment choice, playing surface, environmental factors, and aggregated and anonymized player injury information – in an effort to better treat and rehabilitate injuries in the near-term, and also eventually predict and intervene to prevent injury.

AWS and the NFL will also collaborate to develop computer vision models using Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, and Amazon Rekognition to advance the ability to detect concussions and identify the forces that cause them. Any techniques developed to detect and prevent concussion may also be capable of being extended to reduce a wide range of injuries. Any reductions, especially in concussions and lower extremity injuries, could have a potentially profound effect on player safety.

Since 2017, the NFL has utilized AWS as its official cloud and ML provider for the NFL Next Gen Stats (NGS) platform, which provides real-time location data, speed, and acceleration for every player during every play on every inch of the field. The NGS platform leverages the breadth and depth of AWS’s services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and ML services to visualize the action on the field, uncover deeper insights, and expand the fan experience by offering a broader range of advanced statistics. AWS and the NFL have collaborated to deliver innovative advanced stats, such as Completion Probability and Expected Yards After Catch, which have quickly become fan favorites.