The National Football League is hoping that artificial intelligence can help reduce concussions in athletes. The NFL "Digital Athlete" is an artificial intelligence tool that uses TV images and sensors embedded in helmets, mouth guards and shoulder pads to try to reduce injuries. The tool creates a digital replica of an NFL athlete in a virtual environment. Using machine learning and computer vision technology, the tool then pinpoints impacts and injuries and helps researchers find new ways to improve player safety. "Having the computers understand how many times a player hits his helmet during the course of a game [helps] find ways to reduce the amount of helmet contact,"," Jeff Miller, NFL executive vice president, told New Scientist. Within the environment generated by the tool, an infinite number of game scenarios can be run, "giving the ability to test out new safety equipment, test out rule changes and predict player injury events and recovery trajectories eventually", says Dr Priya Ponnapalli, principal scientist at Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. "What we've shown, I would say pretty definitively, is the relationship between years of play and risk of the disease," said Jesse Mez, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University. Mez hopes that the NFL will make more data available for study, "right now no helmet sensor data [is] made available to any investigators at universities.

The NFL uses data analytics and machine learning to improve the accuracy, speed, and insights given by the Next Gen Stats platform.

The use of technology and statistics in the sports industry is nothing new. In fact, for some decades now, professionals in the field have used the data generated during these activities to help athletes perform better. However, in the last several years, there was a revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) became part of some of the main sports and sports leagues in the world, such as soccer, Formula 1, and football. The emergence of these technologies has taken the use of statistics generated through sports to a new level in the industry because they provide an almost infinite amount of information.

NFL and AWS will use data and analytics to co-develop the "Digital Athlete," a platform that aims to improve player safety, treatment, and ultimately, predict and prevent injury Building on the existing Next Gen Stats (NGS) partnership and as the NFL marks its 100th season, AWS and NFL will innovate together to shape the future of football. The partnership aims to leverage AWS's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services to provide a deeper and more profound understanding of the game than ever before, making transformational change possible in football, other sports, and potentially other industries. The NFL and AWS will develop new tools and generate deeper and better-informed insights into player injuries, specifically the impact of a variety of factors such as game rules, equipment, and rehabilitation and recovery strategies. Over time, the collaboration aims to also build the capability to predict the risk of player injuries before they happen. "The NFL is committed to reimagining the future of football," said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Today, the NFL announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services to develop a set of software tools to try and predict what causes player injuries. Called'Digital Athlete,' the program will insert a computer created player into millions of simulated games to generate recommendations about changing player equipment, altering the game's rules, and minimizing injuries in certain scenarios. The program will use Amazon's Regoknition system to break down video feeds from current NFL games and record information about everything from play selection, weather, playing surface, and player position. Amazon and the NFL will partner on a new program called'Digital Athlete,' and AI-driven simulation of millions of games using a computer-created player to learn more about player injuries Amazon's SageMaker software will also be used to build machine learning models to apply that data as the basis to simulate new variations on individual plays and entire games. 'When we apply next-generation technology to advance player health and safety, everyone wins – from players to clubs to fans,' NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.