International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) has just unlocked a new area of application for its artificial intelligence system Watson. Big Blue believes Watson could help optimize the performance of elite runners. As part of the new venture, IBM has inked a partnership with biomarker analysis company Orreco and Oregon Track Club.
Optimizing Training Programs
The ‘Coach Watson’ initiative seeks to optimize the vast amount of data available to peak athlete’s performance. With the supercomputing capabilities of International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) Watson at hand, making sense of the vast amount of data should be easy.
Orreco is to teach Watson how to combine physiological test data, biomarker data as well as data on nutrition and sleep. The idea is to come up with individualized training programs that can help optimize the performance of athletes. Watson capabilities are also expected to come in handy in analyzing the latest research findings in medical journals.
Detecting Injuries
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) believes Watson will be up to the task, in answering how hard or how long a workout should be. There is also hope that Coach Watson may be able to spot signs of a possible injury in advance. Solving this problem should be a huge relief for teams as most of them always end up incurring huge sums of money as players sit on the bench injured.
Coach Watson main role, in this case, will be to ensure each athlete is in a zone of peak performance ahead of a big competition.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done on the intelligent system according to Orreco CEO, Brian Moore. There is, however, no doubt that Watson has the potential to succeed on this front as it moves up the ranks. Watson has already achieved substantial success in extracting relationships in huge quantities of data with a proven record to do trade-off analysis
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) says that it continues to receive requests for possible areas of applications for Watson. The sports arena presents a perfect opportunity for the company to get its products and solutions to a huge market base.