Breaking down the trial process for IMU Step
We at IMeasureU are confident that IMU Step will help you remove the guesswork from your return to play, and provide deeper insights and solutions than your current tracking setup. To help you investigate the system in your own environment, we offer 4 week trials to qualifying practitioners. This process is designed to help the multidisciplinary team within an organization understand their problem, gain clarity on whether IMeasureU can provide a solution, interpret the data being collected, and establish how that data can be incorporated within the larger data ecosystem. IMeasureU’s customer feedback leads you through every step of the process and ensure that you feel comfortable interpreting the data and providing feedback. Feedback from partners and potential partners is what drives innovation and therefore more comprehensive solutions.
The sports technology implementation process as outlined by Lorena Torres
If we follow the vetting process outlined by Lorena Torres, the first step is to clarify the performance questions we need to answer. Upon contacting IMeasureU for a trial, we’ll work with you to help define the problem ankle mounted IMUs can help you solve. Typical trial problems can range from reducing a high team reinjury rate to better monitoring of healthy players or even a custome biomechanical research question. In any case, the IMU customer success team will work with you to establish what ‘success’ looks like for this IMU trial.
“The main problem we had at Gloucestershire is that we struggle to characterise the intensity of bowling. We turned to IMeasureU as it looked really promising how we could characterise bowling intensity in the field” – Bob Smith – Strength & Conditioning Coach at Gloucestershire Cricket
Once we’ve established clear performance questions and success criteria, we’ll begin to teach you the ins and outs of the system. At the beginning of your trial, we’ll send you trial sensors, provide you links to download the software, and set you up with a trial database. In week one, our customer success team will then take your through the collection process so you can start gathering data. Week two of the IMU trial is focused on data collection an best practices. It is during this time that you will become familiar with how to collect, download and visualise IMU data. Towards the end of week two, you will check in with the customer success team for your first deep dive into the data. During this deep dive, the IMU team will help you interpret your data and help answer questions with your data, always keeping in mind the performance question(s).
Weeks three and four of the trial will follow a similar theme so you can expand your data collection and test the system thoroughly. The conversations can then move further into analysis of the data and ensuring you are comfortable with interpreting and communicating its implications. IMeasureU will help you prepare any materials or presentations you need to make your case to the relevant stakeholders. Throughout this process, we always encourage product feedback. We endeavour to act on product feedback as quickly and efficiently as possible to enable users to gain as much value from the product as possible.
“During our IMU trial they made some pretty drastic changes to the software which was great for us as it showed they were willing to take feedback on board and make the product better.” Bob Smith – Strength & Conditioning Coach at Gloucestershire Cricket
Once the four week IMU trial is completed, we then revisit the pre-agreed aims of the trial to establish whether the process has been a success.
To summarise the trial process –
- Week 1 – Trial goals, establish ‘success’ criteria and access to hardware and software
- Week 2 – Hardware and software familiarization, data collection and an initial data review (1)
- Week 3 – Data collection and data deep dive (2)
- Week 4 – Data collection, data deep dive call (3) and review of ‘success’ criteria
We provide this opportunity for sports performance and medical practitioners to trial IMU Step to enable them to see exactly how IMU Step can help solve problems and answer questions in their own environment. It also helps you understand how the technology integrates within your established data management processes and technologies (Read how physiotherapist Andrew Gray did exactly that at the Sharks).
New technology is always shiny and fun,but we want to ensure that you set yourself up for long term success, and have objective data to solve your pressing problems and move the needle forward.
Interested in trialing IMU Step yourself? Get in touch with a sports scientist today.
Learn more
We have spoken to numerous IMU Step users about how they use sports technology within their environment. Follow the links below to learn more –
IMU Step: Helping to monitor chaos during rehab?
How to Improve Patient Outcomes with Objective Data
Using inertial sensors to improve the return to play process: A case study with Loughborough University
