Rocketmakers win Queen's Award for Enterprise

BATH, U.K. - April 23, 2018 - PRLog -- Rocketmakers, the British software designers who have helped a wide range of startups and industry giants launch disruptive technology products, has been awarded Britain's most prestigious business honour: The Queen's Award for Enterprise.

Announced publicly today by Her Majesty The Queen, Rocketmakers has been recognised for demonstrating outstanding results in innovation, particularly for its development of the Performance Development Management System (PDMS).

Since its launch in 2014 in partnership with the English Institute of Sport (EIS), PDMS has been adopted by over 75% of the UK's national sporting bodies as a tool for monitoring and managing athlete performance and helping avoid injury.

PDMS's strengths include its ability to capture the high-quality athlete data, which is presented to coaches and medical staff in formats that encourage insights to emerge.

Athletes may enter data into PDMS multiple times a day using a specially designed app. The required information varies from sport to sport, but typically athletes are asked to rate their energy level, intensity of training, and recovery. Other questions ask athletes to rate their quality of sleep, food intake, or even their mood.

If an athlete suffers an injury during training they are able to log it immediately, identifying the location of the injury on the body, level of pain, and any loss of mobility or strength.

Athlete-supplied information is matched up with medical records and plotted on a timeline. Coaches and medical staff are able to gain insights into past training patterns and history, stay up-to-date on an athlete's present fitness in real-time, and plan training for competitions in ways that help maximise performance and minimise risk of injury.

For more urgent issues, PDMS also sends email alerts to support staff to notify them of specific problems with athletes as they arise (for example, if an athlete rates soreness in a muscle as high). The exact issue and the threshold for triggering an alert are set by support staff to meet the individual needs of each athlete.

The subjective nature of much of the information captured by PDMS is not accidental. Elite sports training programmes can produce enormous amounts of data - the challenge for support staff is deciding which data is most relevant for genuine decision-making, and establishing the proper context for it. Previous information systems used by elite sport programmes have often provided central repositories for data, but lacked the functionality to turn that data into a context-based narrative that provides a rounded view of the athlete's journey.

Without context, data can actually mislead decision makers, prompting them to focus on the wrong indicators or ignore potentially important issues not reflected in the information they are presented with. For example, knowing how well an athlete performs in each training session will track an athlete's improvement, but none of the reasons underlying that improvement (ie. recent sleep, mood, recent injuries, recent travel, etc.).

By collecting and collating multiple performance factors from multiple sources, PDMS creates a 'story' about the athlete's journey to competition. Each type of data provides a context for the rest - for example a change in performance for a particular athlete may be typical for a few days following a long flight.

Some of the most important data for providing this context (soreness, energy, mood, etc) is therefore highly subjective. Because of its subjectiveness, and the challenge of collecting it regularly and consistently, this type of data has not typically been incorporated into previous elite sports training systems. Subjective data can not only 'fill in the gaps' in more objective data sets (explaining reasons why performance might be better or worse on a given day) but it also helps decision makers see important problems that objective measurements miss. For example, if an athlete's stats are improving but the athlete feels increasingly poorly it would be important for coaches to notice the correlation.

Following the 2016 games, where PDMS was credited as instrumental in the UK's record medal haul, more sport national governing bodies have signed up for PDMS, and existing users have integrated it more deeply into their training regimes.

PDMS was also widely used by British athletes at the Games just concluded in Australia. Overall, the England team won 136 medals, second in the table to hosts Australia. England's 45 gold medal tally is just one behind the record for most ever gold medals by a non-host team.

Richard Godfrey, CEO of Rocketmakers, says: "Winning the Queen's Award is an enormous honour for Rocketmakers, and real validation of the hard work we have been doing for the last decade. We would like to thank our partners at the English Institute of Sport, and the athletes that use PDMS every day, for giving us the opportunity to work with them. It is a real thrill for us whenever an athlete we are helping has a winning performance - today it feels like we've won our own world championship."

Emma Wiggs MBE, 2016 gold medalist and six-time world champion in KL2 class paracanoe, says: "PDMS has been a real game changer for us on a day-to-day-basis."

"I think PDMS has been crucial in the run up to Rio in particular with logging our grip-strength scores every day, it allowed me to identify when my shoulders might have been a bit tight, and get the physio before the problem had actually occurred, so it was really crucial in being an indicator of a potential injury in the run up to Rio."

For more information please visit www.rocketmakers.com