Supporting Tomorrow’s Athletes with Today’s Generative Artificial Intelligence

Sports have played a role in most of our lives. It helps us develop physically, mentally, and socially. It gives us the opportunity to learn new skills, understand the value of working as a team, and experience the thrill of competition. For some, playing sports remains a childhood pastime. For many, it flourishes into a lifelong passion and hobby. For a select few, it becomes a career. Whether a player’s journey is just beginning or is well advanced, Blast Motion is using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make every swing of the bat (or club) count for more.

Based in San Marcos, California, Blast Motion is an information company that provides motion analysis and performance insights. As a small business, it intelligently combines the biomechanics of movement with sensor data, video capture technology, and cloud-based software services. Simply put, Blast Motion helps athletes refine their skills and continually elevate their game.

Democratizing sporting improvement

Professional athletes have trusted Blast Motion technology for over a decade as a means to gain a competitive edge at the very top of their respective sports. But the company wanted to go further, and make its insights as accessible to up-and-coming amateurs and weekend enthusiasts as they are to full-time professionals. To do this, it needed tech capable of turning complex data into digestible and easy to implement actions that players outside of the professional sphere could act on. This had proved challenging in the past, as it would take an elite-level coach to interpret each player’s unique movement, combined with the data provided by Blast Motion products, to create a customized improvement action plan. The emergence of generative AI applications and Blast’s large data set of continually growing swings has changed that, enabling the company to empower players of all levels with its latest product enhancement—Blast iQ™.

For golfers, baseball, and softball players, every swing provides valuable data and is a teachable moment in time. The Blast Motion sensors capture every one of these moments, analyzing them, and building actionable insights from the data. Blast iQ™ combines those insights with generative AI to deliver personalized training sessions, with improvement tracked through weekly reports. Such programs are normally expensive and only accessible to a small number of elite players. Now, thanks to Blast iQ™, players of all ages and skill levels have access to instruction and guidance to help them improve at the sport they love.

From data centric to information centric

Blast iQ™ analyzes and compares a player’s swing against a machine learning model comprising of data from over 325 million swings to generate a dynamic and personalized player profile. This profile contains a natural language explanation that summarizes an athlete’s strengths, areas for improvement, and overall progress. This turns complex and deep data analytics into digestible and understandable improvement insights.

It’s a team game

Blast Motion worked with us and AWS Partner Network consultant Persistent to bring its vision for Blast iQ™ to life. With advanced access to Amazon Bedrock’s generative AI framework and Amazon Titan’s foundation models, Persistent helped to quickly build out Blast iQ™ and the front-end experience. Controls built into Amazon Bedrock were designed to help Blast Motion address data anonymity and security. The result? The power of a biomechanics coach in the pocket of every user.

Personalized insights for every player

Picture a high school student with dreams of getting a baseball scholarship and eventually turning pro. While his abilities stood out in middle school, he’s been struggling to make his mark as a high school athlete. Blast iQ™ analyzes his swing data, determines his level of play, swing quality and consistency, and gets him on track to make his dream a reality.

The Blast iQ™ generative AI engine uses various metrics to build a summary of his performance. Clustering analyzes our budding professional’s swing data and build out his swing profile. These insights, along with other metrics, are used by the Blast iQ™ generative AI model to produce the following recommendation:

“Overall, it appears that your Bat Speed is fairly consistent across your swings. However, your rotational acceleration varies and is something we can focus on improving for your development. Lower rotational acceleration suggests that you may be relying more on your arms and less on your body to accelerate the bat in your swing. Focus on starting your swing with your core and hips, this will allow you to generate more power efficiently and reliably.”

“Your rotational acceleration is mid-range in comparison to other players in your level of play. Adding loading drills will help increase the energy you release during your swing, which could improve your time to contact.’’

Step up to plate with confidence

With a Blast Motion sensor on his bat, and Blast iQ™ in his pocket, our aspiring Babe Ruth has everything he needs to become a better baseball player. He understands the ‘why’ behind every performance, and always has a goal to work towards. Every time he locks eyes with a pitcher, he knows he’s done everything possible to make what happens next, a success.

Together, Blast Motion, Persistent, and AWS are helping to democratize sporting improvement, giving players a platform to become the best they can be.

Next steps

Learn how your small business can amplify its competitive edge with generative AI tools on AWS. Or find the right AWS expert for your needs.