Big Data & Sports

In no other field has the application of big data analysis to separate the essential from the interesting become as valuable and lucrative as in sports. The Adidas Group recently purchased Runtastic, a sport and fitness tracking app for €220 million. Through such apps, companies collect large amounts of data and use it to improve customer experience as well as their business decisions.

Personal Training Plan

Sports apps accumulate large volume of data. Millions of people use such apps while running, jogging, biking & walking. Consider a good bike app that tracks time, distance, duration, speed, temperature, altitude, pedalling rate and heart rate. It logs data approximately every 6 seconds. Multiply 600 hourly records from seven parameters with the weekly average of six workouts by a million users and you get an annual data volume in terabytes. Of course a good part of this data is redundant. Big Data Analysis can scan large volumes of data and highlight information relevant for the user — including suggestions for a personal training plan. Such tasks are difficult to automate and require intuitive analysts who can see the essential, just like Kepler.