Force plate baseline deviation monitor
Problem
Testing days on force plate and jump-testing hardware produce a results file that gets exported into a spreadsheet or the athlete management system and then, in practice, glanced at one session at a time. Nobody routinely plots a given athlete's jump height or left-right asymmetry across the last ten sessions against their own history, because doing that by hand for a full squad takes longer than anyone has. Results often reach coaching staff a week after the test, by which point selection has already happened, and a slow decline in output or a widening asymmetry — an early flag for injury risk — sits unnoticed in a tab nobody reopens.
Product idea
A monitor that takes each testing session's export, builds a rolling baseline per athlete per metric from that athlete's own recent history rather than a squad average, and flags when a new result falls outside a configured band — a drop in jump height, a widening asymmetry index. A single live board shows status per athlete per metric with the date of the last test, and a crossed threshold pushes an alert naming the athlete, the metric and the session to a named performance staff member. It does not attempt to explain the cause or suggest a load adjustment — it flags the deviation for a person to review.
Who it is for
Sports scientists and strength and conditioning coaches who run testing batteries, and the Head of Performance who needs early warning of physical decline rather than a spreadsheet reviewed after selection is already made.
Possible first version
Manual upload of testing session exports as CSV, a rolling baseline calculated per athlete per metric from their own last several sessions, configurable deviation thresholds, a live status board across the squad, and an emailed alert to a named recipient when a threshold is crossed. No direct connection to force plate hardware or the athlete management system in version one, and no automated interpretation of what caused a flagged deviation.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Sports scientist, Strength & conditioning coach, Head of Performance
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Collegiate athletics, Academy & youth, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Force plate and testing hardware, Spreadsheets, Athlete management systems
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have in place before this is worth building?
A consistent export format from your testing hardware and enough testing history per athlete to establish a baseline — a handful of sessions at minimum, more is better. If your squad tests infrequently, the baseline will be thin at first and the tool should say so rather than flag confidently on two data points. It gets more useful the longer testing has been running consistently.
Does this replace the athlete management system we already log testing data into?
No. It reads an export from your existing process and does the trend comparison your team does not currently have time to do by hand. Your athlete management system stays the system of record for the raw results. Version one exports or emails flags rather than writing back into it, so the comparison layer can prove its worth before anyone wires up an integration.
Our staff already look at every athlete's numbers after testing. Why do we need an alert on top of that?
Looking at a single session's numbers and tracking drift against an athlete's own baseline across a season are different jobs, and the second one is the one that gets skipped when the squad is large and testing is frequent. If your staff genuinely already do that comparison by hand for every athlete every session, this has less to add — that is worth being honest about before committing to it.
Who has to maintain this once it exists?
Someone — usually the sports scientist who owns testing — needs to keep thresholds sensible as the squad's baseline shifts across a season, and someone needs to actually action a flag rather than let it sit. The tool does not decide what a flagged deviation means; if no one is reviewing the flags, it becomes a well-organised list of things nobody looked at.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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