In the SportTechie Startup Profile Series, Sean Kerklaan, the CEO of Fatigue Science, discusses his business that aims to provide advanced sleep and fatigue analytics to elite sports teams.
1. What is your elevator pitch?
We provide advanced sleep and fatigue analytics to elite sports teams to help them unlock the competitive advantage of sleep. We work with professional teams like the Vancouver Canucks, Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Mavericks to provide validated insights that help athletes recover faster and perform better.
2. Problem & Solution
The science shows us a surprisingly low level of fatigue impairs physical and cognitive performance. Studies have also shown that chronic sleep restriction increases injury risk, shortens playing careers, decreases testosterone levels, and reduces sprint times and shooting accuracy, among other harmful effects.
The good news is that sleep has a direct, measurable and highly predictable effect on human performance. With an understanding of sleep science and the right tools, sleep can be managed the way other building blocks of human performance are. Fatigue Science delivers scientifically-validated technology to measure this impact. We do this using data collected from a wrist-worn device, and passing the data through a biomathematical model which was developed by the US Military. Through this process, we can turn sleep data into performance data. The coaching staff is then empowered to work with individual players as needed. Staff can also quantify the impact that scheduling and travel have on the overall team’s performance.
