Wearable Tech: A Game Changer for Athletes' Performance

When a member of Lehigh’s football team tore their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) during the first game of last season, it was a devastating injury that coaches expected could take up to a year to heal, said head coach Kevin Cahill.

Thanks to information provided by wearable technology, which includes devices such as GPS trackers, blood oxygen saturation monitors, heart rate monitors, motion sensors and muscle oxygen sensors, the football player was able to be rehabilitated in half that amount of time, Cahill said.

Hundreds of Lehigh student-athletes–including those on the football team–are participating in a study involving wearable technology led by Dhruv Seshadri, an assistant professor of bioengineering. The study is hastening athletes’ return after injuries, and more importantly, could provide objective data to guide rehabilitation programs and mitigate overuse injuries.

“I think there’s still a lack of actionable insight that can be gleaned from the data,” Seshadri said. “What I mean by that is a lot of these devices provide numbers, provide analytics, but what does that mean in the context of what the athlete is doing? That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied to translate such data.”

Seshadri and a team of students are working in the new Seshadri Lab at Lehigh to develop improved wearable tech for athletes and other groups, such as hospital patients who could benefit from noninvasive monitoring. Part of that process is developing analytics that can translate data in a user-friendly way. The team is assessing the accuracy of existing devices and developing predictive models to translate reactive data into something actionable.

The data could be used to show how athletes are performing over time, how they compare to their position groups and how they are performing in relation to the rest of their teammates, Seshadri said.

He also is in the early stages of designing his own wearable device for applications ranging from sports medicine to neuromuscular disease, cardiology and neonatal monitoring.

Data-Informed Sports

When Seshadri came to Lehigh last year, he continued his research into wearable technology and its health implications, which he started during his graduate training at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Seshadri and his students have been working with the men’s and women’s soccer teams, men’s and women’s basketball teams, men’s and women’s swim teams and football. Seshadri’s group collected data from nearly 200 student-athletes last season and will collect data from even more this academic year.

Joseph Amitrano ’23, a Ph.D. student studying bioengineering in the Seshadri Lab, is using programs such as Python and RStudio to develop machine learning models that assess the workload-response variables in athletes to evaluate performance and rehabilitation.

“We are looking at trends in the data to see if they may be more susceptible to injury, so on that front we are interested in incorporating their sleep parameters, knowing how stressed they are, their energy levels and, from a physiological standpoint, what their heart rate is, how fast they are moving and what their muscle oxygen saturation levels are,” Amitrano said.

There are many factors that contribute to whether an athlete is injured, from how stressed they are, both physically and mentally, to the strength, or lack of strength, in certain muscle groups, he said.

“At Lehigh University, they are student-athletes, so we know that the academic component significantly impacts their onfield performance, and their on-field performance affects their academics,” Amitrano said. “There’s that synergistic pathway between the two. We are trying to understand, holistically, what is going to allow them to perform at the highest level.”

Wearable Tech at Lehigh

The terms of Seshadri’s study protect the identity of the students participating, but Cahill and other Lehigh coaches are proponents of wearable tech. The coaches say it has created friendly competition among teammates who like to compare stats, it’s improved performance, and most importantly, it’s helping to prevent injury and guide rehabilitation.

Working with Seshadri’s team has been an interdisciplinary experience, Calabrese said. She’s working with a team of people to make important decisions about players instead of acting alone.

“I’m collaborating with sports medicine, we are working with our sports performance coach, a sports psychologist and nutritionist,” Calabrese said. “It’s very holistic in the sense that decisions aren’t being made in a vacuum.”

Seshadri’s Other Work

In addition to his work at Lehigh, Seshadri is studying the application of wearable tech in a variety of other areas. His team recently partnered with Geisinger Health System to study the implications wearable tech could have for pediatric and adolescent athletes. Most devices on the market today are geared toward adults because when a device is being developed, it is easier to get enrollment and consent from adult participants, Seshadri explained.

There’s a significant need for a pediatric device, especially because young athletes today are training harder, playing longer hours and suffering more injuries. There’s been an epidemic of “Tommy John” injuries among youth baseball players, Seshadri said. Named after the retired pitcher who played Major League Baseball from 1963 to 1989, John injured his ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) and became the first person to undergo a UCL reconstruction surgery.

Seshadri’s lab is also leading a study using wearable technology on pediatric and adolescent female softball pitchers in the Indianapolis area. He is interested in monitoring the participants’ workload with the goal of using scientific data to drive policies that will help reduce injury.

Seshadri’s team also plans to work with students at SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio. The facility is an international boarding school for high school and postgraduate elite athletes.

In addition to the athletic angle, Seshadri believes wearable tech could be used for noninvasive monitoring of individuals with serious conditions such as congestive heart failure, peripheral arterial disease, dysphasia and neuromuscular disease to provide immediate feedback on muscle quality, function and tone, and help guide rehabilitation.

A Personal Connection

Seshadri, who played a variety of sports when he was growing up, says he has always been interested in the convergence of human performance, sports and technology.

“The opportunity to look at technology with something I love—like sports—to integrate the two together was something I stumbled upon in a serendipitous manner, but it’s really something I enjoy. It’s my passion,” he said.

Seshadri recalls taking a class on biomedical entrepreneurship (BioDesign) while earning his master’s degree at Case Western. One day, the class began talking about wearable technology in the NBA. At the time, the Golden State Warriors won the first of their four-year rivalry in the NBA Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers—a particularly exciting win for Seshadri, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

Soon after, Seshadri’s father sent him an article on wearable technology in the NBA and encouraged him to pursue wearable tech as a career.

“I started reading about stuff they were doing and I thought, ‘This is really cool, like how you can monitor workloads and correlate that to injuries,’” Seshadri said. “It was a really fascinating mix of physiology, engineering and medicine. I was interested in all three. I credit my parents for giving me the keys and foundation to pursue my passion.”

After learning more about the field, Seshadri contacted members of the Cleveland Browns medical team and ended up collaborating with them for more than seven years to study wearable tech.

Seshadri’s passion for the subject matter led him to open the Seshadri Lab at Lehigh, which now has about 25 students, including those pursuing undergraduate, master’s and doctorate degrees. Most recently, the Seshadri Lab welcomed a visiting undergraduate researcher from SRM University in Chennai, India, and had several high school interns this past summer.

An Interdisciplinary Lab

Seshadri’s students say the lab is an interdisciplinary space that has given them hands-on experience and a chance to explore their interests.

Tony Del Vecchio ’23 is a second-year master’s student studying bioengineering. He’s interested in mechatronics, a multidisciplinary field that combines mechanical engineering and electronics. He’s working on a smart, orthopedic knee brace.

The brace will include a gyroscope sensor that can tell doctors how much range of motion a patient has, and determine how effective their rehabilitation treatment is. “I really like hands-on projects, getting to design stuff , and this is a very design-centric, mechanics-focused project,” Del Vecchio said.

He loves the Seshadri Lab’s sense of community and how interdisciplinary it is. Many of the students have a bioengineering background, but their interests are diverse, including materials science, electronics and statistics, Del Vecchio said.

Hayley Whitney ’24 is a first-year Ph.D. student studying bioengineering. Her undergraduate degree was in statistics. She credits the Seshadri Lab with giving her practical experience.

“This is my first real opportunity having real-world data and to work with extracting that data, imperfect scenarios and problem-solving. It was my first chance to put my statistician’s hat on and say, ‘What can I do? How can I make a meaningful impact?’”