Dr. Martin O’Reilly and Dr. Darragh Whelan launched Output Sports in 2020. The foundations of the company and its resulting benefits to practitioners involved in the development and welfare of athletes began eight years earlier in 2012. O’Reilly and Whelan were researching machine learning methods for maximizing the accuracy and diversity of measurements with a single wearable sensor for exercise analysis.
During their product research, O’Reilly and Whelan interviewed and surveyed over 100 sports practitioners worldwide to determine their needs. They set out to create a platform that serves all groups involved in the wide-ranging areas of athletic performance development, athlete welfare, injury prevention, and rehabilitation. Three common themes emerged during this process, all regarding frustrations/limitations of many sports-technology solutions:
1) Cumbersome data capture and management across siloed systems
2) Inaccessibility of accurate measurement technologies to many practitioners due to their cost, size, complexity, and lack of portability
3) Lack of athlete engagement during testing, training, and monitoring processes
“Darragh was highly frustrated by subjective decision-making in things like return to play and the inaccessibility (cost, size, portability) of most tech for practitioners and athletes,” O’Reilly said. “Having taught laboratory biomechanics, I wanted to make tools more practical and accessible to help bring the value of elite-level sports science to a wider audience.”
“The key values of Output are being relentlessly user-focused, scientifically-driven in our research, development, and validation processes, and taking an interdisciplinary approach to solving these issues.”
O’Reilly and Whelan sought to make the process more objective rather than subjective. “We wanted to help the practitioner measure each stage of development by creating a complete solution that shows the progress of the training process and helps support the practitioner with meaningful, actionable data each step of the way,” O’Reilly says. “The mission is to enable improved decision-making in performance training and return to play scenarios.”
The Output Sports system is also designed to utilize crucial universal traits among competitive athletes: their motivation to constantly improve themselves and excel in all areas of their sport and training. The Output platform helps drive this intent by integrating real-time feedback, live leaderboards, and comprehensive yet user-friendly in-app analysis for every repetition and movement performed.
“In terms of athletic development training, we wanted to look at the whole range of what’s involved, not just gym-based work — this includes assessing how an athlete runs, jumps, and performs sports-specific movements, and the process involved to improve those characteristics through objective measurement and reinforcing correct technique,” O’Reilly says.
“Athletes are driven to improve in every area of their sport. We felt we could capitalize on that with our platform and make elite performance training simple to measure yet scalable within any environment. We’re also able to provide this type of high-quality data cost-effectively compared to the higher price points associated with the technologies typically needed to gain these kinds of insights.”
To that end, the Output system’s cost—as well as the portability/versatility—benefits high school strength coaches in particular.
“High school strength coaches and athletes can use our mobile app to enter training/testing data, whether in the gym, on the field, or while traveling. That information goes straight into Hub (Output’s online training management software), which is saved into individual athlete profiles, allowing for subsequent comprehensive analysis,” O’Reilly says. “We help the coach create custom analysis dashboards and reports that can be shared with athletes, parents, and key stakeholders so everyone can understand where an athlete has come from, where they are at, and what steps to be taken for further improvement. It’s an honor to work with the NHSSCA to provide these tools and serve the needs of high school strength coaches.”
Output Sports also helps strength coaches use the growing trend of Velocity-Based Training (VBT). O’Reilly said: “During our research, many strength coaches asked if we could add VBT to our system, make it user-friendly, and go beyond just weightlifting to allow measurement of anything from squats to medicine ball work to kettlebell exercises. We wanted the strength coach also to be able to measure things that they typically could only get from a force plate, a linear position transducer, or a goniometer, for example.”
Output Sports provides instant athlete insights and the ability to perform comprehensive long-term training monitoring and analysis. With a library of 180+ movements/assessments, Output’s recently launched V2 sensor allows validated and reliable measurement of strength, power, mobility, jumping, ground contacts, balance/stability, and muscular endurance.
