Lode Goossens, Sports Scientist and Founder of Hylyght: “I strongly believe in giving data ownership to athletes”

There are certain jobs – Undertakers, Hairdressers, Tax Investigators – that will likely exist forever, and we suspect that Sports Physios belongs to that list. If there’s one thing guaranteed in the life of an athlete, it’s that they’ll get injured. And Lode Goossens, Sports Scientist and Founder of Hylyght, is here to help.

Fortunately, he and his team have data and science to back them up. Lode has a Master’s Degree in both Sport Science and Sports Physiotherapy, with a deep expertise in talent identification, injury prevention and return-to-sport screening. And, topically, Lode has strong ties with the Olympics, having been involved in the IOC Young Leaders programme since 2016.

One of Lode’s passions is to help spot talent in young athletes – and then make sure they don’t get injured! And while that can involve sophisticated analysis of data, much boils down to the basics such as growth speed. “A lot of growth-related injuries can easily be avoided by mapping the phase of physical growth and adjusting the training load for those who are in a period of accelerated growth,” he explains. But how many coaches keep track of such information?

And that’s just the start. To find out more, read on to discover not only how Hylyght can help but the sound principles of keeping young and old athletes injury-free using data and sports technology.

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Tell us your elevator pitch

Hylyght is a rehabilitation and talent development platform that transforms the way physiotherapists, physicians and sports academy directors use data. It uses science-based tests to measure, assess and guide both athletes and patients towards recovery and sports excellence. The platform enables organisations to capture, store, analyse and visualise athlete and patient data around physical tests and questionnaires. There is also an integration with different hardware tools to sync data automatically.

Based on available data custom rehabilitation, training and development can be created, or children can be oriented to fitting sports. Every professional working with athletes, including the doctor, physio, coach and academy director, can use a variety of science-backed, pre-loaded test sets and share clear, attractive and actionable reports to guide and educate patients and athletes about their physical progress.

The platform is flexible to add new tests and benchmarks, which makes it the go-to platform for all types of physical testing, ranging from primary school kids over talented young athletes, professional and recreational athletes all the way to hospitals with anterior cruciate ligaments reconstruction, total knee or hip replacement patients and even oncology patients.

Can you give an example of a complex problem in sports that you – or your company – have been involved in tackling with technology?

When it comes to data in sports, there are two options: either an organisation has very little objective information to go on and most decisions are based on gut feelings, or they have so many sources of information that it becomes really hard to distinguish between crucial information that will lead to certain actions and other information that is interesting to look at but doesn’t really lead to anything in particular.

With Hylyght, we try to focus on collecting data that are actionable and to have a vision around the data you collect: what happens when scores increase or decrease? How do you manage streams of information, making sure the right piece of information gets to the right person at the right moment in time?

For some organisations that means combining different data sources in one clear dashboard, reducing the noise from too many data points. For others, it’s about stepping up their game and collecting useful information or helping them move away from Excel files that serve their immediate purpose but make it a tedious task to get information across within the organisation.

We always start with the ‘why’ of measuring, which is often overlooked.

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Thinking of injury prevention and/or recovery, what are some technology and/or science developments you’ve found particularly fascinating?

In injury prevention, there is a large focus on pre-season screenings, and this is an important part of the toolkit: it allows physios to get to know their athletes, gets pre-existing issues on the radar and come up with a plan to tackle a variety of issues throughout the season.

However, with young athletes, it makes a lot of sense to first start monitoring their growth speed. A lot of growth-related injuries can easily be avoided by mapping the phase of physical growth and adjusting the training load for those who are in a period of accelerated growth. A lot of youth teams are already using heart rate monitors and GPS data but forget about something so basic as regular measurements of height and weight – while this is a crucial parameter to monitor in 11-16-year-olds.

One critical point is data quality; there is very little room for error in measuring the body height and it’s surprising how often mistakes are made. To counter this, we integrated a medical grade height en weight measurement tool with the platform, improving accuracy while reducing the cost of the measurements in terms of manpower. It brings a very powerful tool – with an easy-to-monitor metric – so close to so many youth coaches and we really aim for a large impact on the population of young athletes.

How do you stay up to date on the latest technology developments in sports?

We have close ties to researchers and to different universities in different countries, and we’re involved in a lot of research projects. Having access to research results ahead of publication gives us a competitive advantage.

Besides research, we also see a lot of innovation coming from our customers. Offering them a solution for all their data about movement, we get a lot of requests to add new tests or tools to the platform.

We built our tool very flexible in this regard, so it’s not a lot of work to add more tests and more questionnaires – around 100 per year are added. This resulted in a large library of tests, with the ones that are evidence-based – valid, reliable standardised – being published for all our customers and the ones that are ahead of scientific validation being shown only to those who requested them.

Operating on the cross-over between health tech and sports tech, we’re also on the front row in both sectors – which allows us to spot new approaches in both sectors and remain innovative.

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What do you believe is the biggest opportunity in sports tech right now?

Much like what’s happening in healthcare, where data vaults with your personal health data are most certainly the future, I strongly believe in giving data ownership to athletes – so they can decide who they want to share their data with. If an athlete changes teams, collected data often remains behind in the previous team, while it’s actually about the athlete so you could argue that it’s his or her data and the athlete should be enabled to keep it. It might be useful in their future career; likewise, when the old team receives a new player they would benefit from getting collected data.

In healthcare, interoperability between different tools is a huge topic and I think sports tech should follow closely what’s happening there. Gone are the days when teams had only one provider of technology, integrating different tools is the norm and when you integrate beyond a single sign-on – for instance when you want to use AI or ML models combining data from different sources, it’s best if there is a standard in which data can be exchanged. We’re both part of health and sports tech, we’re all for crossovers between these two fields.

When it comes to technology, what are the most common mistakes you see sports organisations make?

Many sports organisations are expecting too much from one single tool and are looking for a Swiss army knife that does everything perfectly. This is an impossible stretch for tech companies: it makes a lot more sense to build a very specific tool and open it up by building good APIs. There are a few Athlete Management Systems (AMS) that offer so many different things but there will always be a better tool for most of what they’re offering – simply because they can keep a laser-focus on making the core of their offering better than all others.

For us, this is simply putting everything around physical testing – from pre-season injury prevention and return to sports screening to talent identification and performance testing: all physical testing and related questionnaires find their place on the Hylyght platform.

We’re expanding our offer by linking other tools: different hardware tools to measure things like body height and body weight, force plates, video-based tests, and data from wearables: as long as it’s data around movement we’re happy to have it on the platform. As soon as we’re talking about other features, like personal calendars, technical or tactical video analysis, and day-to-day communication – we integrate with other SaaS platforms instead of trying to become the all-in-one solution.

My advice for sports organisations: make sure you have a central platform or database which links all relevant technologies and avoid tech companies who don’t have APIs or who are unwilling to send data to your own databases. This prevents you from being locked in and forces your providers to keep innovating if they want to stay relevant.