On today’s episode we’re focusing on wearable technology for athlete performance, recovery and injury prevention with Dr. Jacob Calcei, an orthopedic surgeon at University Hospitals in Cleveland and team physician for the Cleveland Browns. 

We’ll start off our discussion today with an article titled “Wearable Performance Devices in Sports Medicine” from the January 2016 issue of Sports Health. The authors review the rapid rise of wearable sensor technologies in athletics, highlighting their ability to track real-time physiologic and movement data for optimizing performance and reducing injury risk. These tools can provide valuable insights into workloads, biomechanics, and fatigue, supporting tailored training programs and early injury prevention strategies. While wearable devices have shown promise, evidence for their effectiveness in professional sports remains limited, and further research is needed to validate accuracy, develop standardized training protocols, and address practical challenges such as reliability and usability.

Then, from the January 2020 issue of Sports Heath, we review an article titled “Does Overexertion Correlate With Increased Injury? The Relationship Between Player Workload and Soft Tissue Injury in Professional American Football Players Using Wearable Technology.” This study investigates whether sudden increases in training load, as measured by wearable GPS and accelerometry technology, are associated with higher rates of soft tissue injury in professional American football players.  

The authors analyzed two NFL seasons and found that injured players experienced significantly greater spikes in workload during the week of injury compared to the prior month. Specifically,  they found that those exceeding an acute-to-chronic workload ratio (ACR) of 1.6 being 1.5 times more likely to sustain an injury. The effect was particularly pronounced in the preseason, when workloads were higher and hamstring injuries were most common. The findings suggest that rapid workload increases predispose athletes to soft tissue injury, while consistent training loads may offer a protective effect. The authors conclude that monitoring player workload with wearable technology could help medical and training staff design safer, more individualized training regimens to reduce injury risk.

We are joined today by Dr. Jacob Calcei, a board-certified orthopedic sports medicine physician and shoulder surgeon at University Hospitals and an assistant professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is a team physician for the Cleveland Browns as well as several local high schools. Dr. Calcei has published extensively on a variety of sports medicine topics, has a particular interest in injury prevention and finding ways that we can make sports safer while optimizing athlete performance. So, we’re very excited to have him join us today.