Biomechanics at the WINTER OLYMPICS | Part 1

We asked eight winter sport biomechanists what researchers have learned since the last Winter Olympics. This is what they said. In the sport of ice hockey, most biomechanics research since the 2018 Games has been focused on better understanding concussion. Specifically, we want to understand when is it happening, where is it happening, and why or how is it happening. At CCM Hockey, we're proud to be partnering with the Neurotrauma Impact Science Lab at the University of Ottawa. The result of this large body of research has been innovative head protection technologies that you can see in our helmets today and have been key in the design of future protective equipment that we're excited to be putting on shelves later this year. In speed skating, we learned a lot about the mechanics of the push-off by combining a simple theoretical model and actual data. It's not yet an automated process, but we were able to improve performance of individual speed skaters. In para-sport, I believe that we're finally starting to get an idea and an understanding about how individual impairments actually affect athletic performance in sport-specific situations. Because a lot of the para-athletes face different constraints depending on the nature of their disability, understanding how the impairments affect sport performance can help both improve the fairness of the competition, but also allow these athletes to actually use their full potential in order to perform as well as they can. The next topic that was important in the last couple of years was the aerial phase. Here, different types of modeling were used and also the wind plays an important role because there is a correction due to the wind. In figure skating since the last Winter Olympics, biomechanists have been reminded of the challenges of measuring aspects of on-ice performance. While biomechanists understand how helpful these measurements could be, it can be difficult to develop technology that is easily incorporated into daily on-ice training. For example, information about training load would be beneficial for skaters and coaches, but measurement devices need to be developed specifically for figure skating due to the complexity of the movements performed. Some of the other exciting advances have been mobile 3D motion capture and the use of inertial measurement units to understand how athletes' joints are moving while they're carving and while they're performing tricks. I think one of the biggest things that biomechanists have been able to learn since the previous Olympics is just how incredibly difficult it is to collect reliable data from within these sports and also how that data is actually able to influence the coach and the athlete on a daily basis. Development of camera equipment has gone fast the last 10 years. We have used this to develop an artificial intelligence system for doing kinematic analysis with markerless tracking. More than 6,000 pictures have been pre-annotated to the machine learning process making the automated pulse estimation. In other words, we have the full 3D skeletal model of the takeoff from regular video. Check out the next two videos to hear what these biomechanists would measure at this Winter Olympics and what they're hoping we'll learn before the next one. For more biomechanics content, be sure to subscribe to our channels in the description. Thank you so much for watching.