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STATS Commissions Unprecedented Third-Party Study of Athlete-Tracking Technology

November 29, 2017

LONDON – November 29, 2017 – STATS, the worldwide leader in sports data and intelligence, commissioned the Technical University of Munich (TUM) for an unparalleled 12-month independent study in an effort to create a global standard for accuracy among athlete-tracking systems.

As part of the continued investment to advance team performance solutions, STATS set out to create a new standard of accuracy for STATS SportVU®, which delivers an abundance of unique performance data through optical tracking of player positioning. For the first time, tracking systems were tested against the sub-centimetre precision of gold-standard technologies in a stadium environment with sport-specific exercises to diagnose and compensate for systematic errors.

Taking a proactive approach, STATS’ first step was a multi-technology study conducted by a testing party at the forefront of sports science. Dr. Martin Lames, TUM’s Chair of Training Science and Computer Science in Sports, conducted accuracy assessments of the SportVU tracking solution, as well as a global-positioning system and a local-positioning technology.

“This study has set new standards for reliability testing of position detection in sports, including new methods of data processing,” said Dr. Lames. “We introduced a gold standard with sub-centimetre accuracy in a 30×30 measurement volume, with all relevant technologies compared. A spectrum of exercises were analysed, from straight running to 5v5, to depict the strengths and weaknesses of the different systems in detail.”

The new tracking data captured by the gold-standard technologies allows STATS to bring SportVU even closer to perfection and validates the technology against the best technologies available.

“Football teams have had to trust accuracy claims of athlete-tracking systems from providers with little more than their word,” said STATS award-winning Director of Data Science Patrick Lucey. “We’ve invested in providing the empirical evidence that not only eases client concerns, but also equips us with ground-truth data in order to move forward in a way others can’t. Plain and simple, it needed to happen, and I’m happy we’ve been on the front foot.”

How STATS’ tracking data is produced, filtered and calculated will now be more precise and uniform for customers around the world, allowing for the effortless comparison of players’ physical outputs and league averages.