Kitman Labs: Injury Prevention Technology Industry

Kitman Labs combines computer science skills, data analytics skills, and sports science knowledge to predict, and hopefully help to prevent, injuries for a particular athlete that they are monitoring. They are at the forefront of the injury prevention technology industry within the sports realm. Each year teams are losing billions of dollars due to injuries, Kitman Labs has created technology to counteract that and to improve the quality of the teams and athletes they are monitoring. As Stephen Smith, the CEO and founder of Kitman Labs, said “we predict everything from the weather to the stock market these days, so why not injuries?” (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). It can be concluded that the future of sports relies on technology to keep

Stephen Smith is a former Senior Strength and Conditioning/Rehabilitation Coach at Leinster Rugby (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). He founded the company based on the research he performed for his Master’s, where he looked at combined risk factors as injury predictors. In June of 2013 Kitman Labs launched their first unique product, they called it Profiler (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). Profiler used algorithms to determine how each individual athlete responded to stress and then gave the coach access to the information in real-time that way the coach could respond and make the decisions they had to with more information (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). Ever since then the company has been evolving and growing, they are a small sized company with anywhere from 11-50 employees (LinkedIn.com May 5, 2016), yet their product is being used in several professional sports leagues, including rugby, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Basketball Association, and the Premier League (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). The expanded their company to the United States in September of 2014, and it is located California’s Silicon Valley (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). This geographical location makes sense because Silicon Valley is the heart of the tech industry in the United States, and Kitman Labs’ whole company

The new board members include Billy Beane, Executive VP of Baseball Operations for the Oakland Athletics and reason behind “Moneyball”; Daryl Morey General Manager of Houston Rockets and founder of MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and John Malloy, General Partner and co-founder of BlueRun Ventures (www.kitmanlabs.com May 5, 2016). This expansion of the board and the expansion to the United States shows that the company is still developing and that they will most likely be successful for a while, especially because of their unique take and outlook on injuries and what they are doing to combat