[Music]
my name is jennifer langton
i'm senior vice president of health and
innovation for the national football
league
while sports is my profession it's
always been a central part of my life in
my second year as a college athlete
a knee injury took me off the field and
what was at that time
one of the greatest challenges i had
ever faced became inspiration for my
career
i know personally the impact an injury
can make
on an athlete's life and also what an
impact technology
and innovation can have in treating
injuries and preventing them before they
happen
in our work at the nfl our highest
priority
is the health and safety of our players
we leverage data
and innovation in order to protect our
players
and make our game safer the nfl has used
aws
as its official cloud computing and
machine learning
provider for the nfl next gen stats
platform since 2017.
nextgen stats provides real-time
location data speed
and acceleration for every player during
every play on every inch of our fields
powered by aws next gen stats enhances
the fan experience at re invent last
year
we built on that successful platform
with the announcement of a new expanded
partnership
a partnership that will pursue an
audacious goal
making the sport of football and
ultimately all
sports safer for athletes who play them
we will combine unique data sets of
human performance
and football information including hours
of video
with aws a strong culture of technology
innovation
to develop a more profound understanding
of our game
and human performance than has ever been
done before
our goal is to improve player safety by
eventually being able to predict
and therefore prevent injury aws ai
and machine learning services combined
with the nfl's data
will speed an entire generation of new
insights
into player injuries game roles
equipment
rehabilitation and recovery but before
we talk more
about where we're going together let me
first share
where we've been in our innovation
journey as a league
showing just how much we've accomplished
in a short amount of time
over the past six years biomechanical
engineers
jointly appointed by the nfl and the nfl
players association
have analyzed on-field injuries and
develop laboratory tests
for helmets that represent the impacts
which cause those injuries on field
this work has been central in informing
everything from our rules changes
to improve protective equipment two
centerpieces of our efforts to reduce
injuries specifically concussions
using video of head impacts our
biomechanical engineers developed a test
that accounts for hundreds of different
variables
speed direction who makes contact with
who
play type and impact among others we use
it to test the performance of the
helmets nfl players wear
and then we create a simple color-coded
chart
with the best performing helmets in the
darkest green
and the worst which are prohibited in
red
this has led to a tremendous behavioral
change
among nfl players over the last five
seasons
we've gone from having about one-third
of players in top performing helmets to
nearly a hundred percent
moving players into better performing
equipment encouraging
safer tackling techniques and rules
changes
all three underpinned by data and
innovation together
have led to significant progress in
keeping our players safe on the field
as a result of this three-pronged injury
reduction plan
we saw a 24 drop in reported concussions
during the 2018 season
and the 2019 season so reported
concussions remain
at that lower rate this validated our
intervention
that's what we mean when we talk about
our key drivers data and innovation
that have evolved the game and will
continue to evolve the game
and aws is helping us to do that
as a part of our work together we are
developing the digital athlete
a computer simulation model of a
football player that can be used to
replicate
infinite scenarios within our game
environment including variations by
position
and even environmental factors by
simulating different situations within a
game environment
our goal is to better foster an
understanding of how to treat
and rehabilitate injuries in the near
term and eventually predict
and prevent injuries in the future
leveraging video and next-gen stats data
we together are doing something that has
never been done
in football before developing computer
vision models that identify the forces
that cause concussions
among other injuries using amazon
sagemaker
we are in the early phases of training
deep learning models
to identify and track a player on field
an important first step as we train the
system
to detect classify and identify
injury significant events and collisions
in the case of our helmet example the
volume of new data the system generates
and the speed with which we can
incorporate that new data into our
helmet testing and analysis
could exponentially expand our ability
to rank
develop and ultimately encourage player
adoption
of better performing helmets and over
time the techniques developed to detect
and prevent concussions will also be
extended
to reduce a wide range of injuries
including foot ankle
and knee injuries this technology is
giving us a deeper
understanding of the game than ever
before
allowing us to reimagine the future of
football
we just launched a challenge to pressure
test the solutions that the nfl and aws
are creating together the crowdsource
computer vision challenge is currently
underway and allows anyone with the
interest
and capability to be a part of our
important work
the data and insights collected through
this project have the potential
not only to revolutionize football but
also to help address
injury prevention and detection beyond
the football field
to society more broadly last year the
nfl celebrated its hundredth season
and we look forward to the next hundred
years of football
we remain committed to innovating on
behalf of our players
and those that come after them i'm so
proud
of the work we are doing together to
that end
the future of football together with aws
is very bright