FFC: Female Football Centre
The Department of Holistic Systems at SimulaMet is collaborating with UiT - The Arctic University of Norway and Forzasys AS on the Female Football Centre (FFC), funded by the Tromsø Research Foundation.
The main goal of the centre is to gain new and fundamental insights into what affects the performance and overall health of female elite football players. A general objective is to devise novel methodologies for epidemiological research that might impact research fields in both sports and medicine. In particular, we aim to develop a non-invasive, privacy-preserving technology that enables us to continuously quantify and monitor athlete behavior where we derive analytic insights from different perspectives (e.g., biomechanics, sports-specific science, medicine, coaches, and athletes).
In the current gold standards for epidemiology, observational prospective cohort studies include that cohort subjects are followed in detail over a longer period. This is an error-prone and tedious task that has for a long time been carried out using pen and paper, and later doing a manual, tedious analysis. Making this entire process easier is the main responsibility of the researchers from the Department of Holistic Systems at SimulaMet.
In cooperation with UiT and Forzasys AS, SimulaMet has earlier developed and used an automatic performance monitoring system for athletes used by both national and elite series soccer teams. The goal is to quantify and develop accurate analysis technologies that enable a personalized assessment and performance development of elite athletes.
The automatic performance monitoring system collects athletes’ subjective parameters, like training load, wellness, injury, and illness, using a small questionnaire-app running on their mobile phones, and the data is transferred to a cloud-based backend system. Then, from a trainer-portal, the data can be automatically visualized for both individual players and team overviews.
In FFC, the objective is to extend the system further to include female-specific parameters and introduce more automatic analysis using, for example, machine learning. We will host and develop the system for all the teams participating in the project, and we will initiate automatic analyses that might be able to predict future overuse injuries or to help maybe to find the best development process of a player or a team.
Svein Arne Pettersen (head of research at the School of sports sciences, UiT) is the centre leader, and he has collaborated with the researchers at SimulaMet for a long time.