Powering the Next Generation of Athlete Safety

Jennifer Langton, senior vice president of player health and innovation for the NFL, joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its virtual re:Invent conference, where she gave an update on the league’s work with AWS to bring speed and scale to player health and safety initiatives, with the goal of powering a new generation of insights into player injuries, game rules, equipment, rehabilitation, and recovery.

While the league has been working with AWS since 2017 on the NFL Next Gen Stats (NGS) platform, this expanded partnership between the NFL and AWS, announced last year, combines the league’s unique data sets of human performance and football information with AWS’s strong culture of technology innovation to develop a more profound understanding of the game and human performance than has ever existed before. Langton discussed how the NFL and AWS, in leveraging video footage and Next Gen Stats data, are doing something never done in football before—developing computer vision models that identify the forces that cause concussions, among other injuries. Work is already underway to train deep learning models to identify and track a player on the field—the important first step in training the system to detect, classify, and identify injury-significant events and collisions.