Turning Zs to Ws

SHU engineering, sports science and women's basketball are thinking several moves ahead

Feature article from the Spring 2021 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

What if your dreams could predict the future? Okay. Fine. Not your dreams per se but rather, the fact that you are dreaming. What if your sleep could tell what would happen when you wake? It’s not so far-fetched. You already know the day after a poor night’s sleep isn’t likely to be overly productive, just as waking refreshed and recharged can set you up to feel as though you can accomplish anything. These are generalizations, of course, roughly the same as looking at clouds on the horizon and predicting rain.

But weather forecasting has come quite a long way from the red-sky-at night level of predictions. What if sleep and performance could do the same? It’s this possibility that’s inspired Tolga Kaya, a professor of engineering, and Chris Taber, head sports scientist at the Pioneer Performance Center, to team up with SHU women’s basketball on a bit of a research project. WHOOP Straps are wearable technology that collect a host of biometric data on the wearer, including the relationship between the wearer’s duration and quality of sleep and how it impacts their physical performance and recovery.

That data—gathered from straps given to every member of the team—coupled with the athletic training and monitoring programs already in place should provide a treasure trove of information about how each athlete processes rest, recovery and physical training—and even, as it happens, the stresses of finals week.

This monitoring of life on and off the court might seem invasive to some young women, but sophomore guard Olivia Dabney immediately saw the potential benefits to her training. “I was more intrigued than anything because I wanted to know how my body recovers,” says Dabney. “This type of strenuous activity requires a ton of rest, and I wanted to better my habits and understand my needs.”

Dabney’s classmate, Jayla Davis, also a guard, was likewise interested in learning about her health and the way it might be impacted by sleep. “Most of the time, we just assume we get the right amount of sleep or our recovery is fine because we feel fine. Now I see how my ability to perform is different from the days when I do get enough rest,” she says. Similarly, the rest of the team agreed to participate in the study (after being assured that the tech was free of GPS trackers), and each was assigned her tech and an anonymous case number.

Currently, the experiment looks only at the recovery of the athletes based on past actions—did you stay up too late, did you go too far in training—but Kaya and Taber hope that, as the data bank grows and the algorithms get more precise, they will eventually be able to make predictions regarding an athlete’s performance in the future. Imagine coaches being in a position to predict with reasonable certainty that their third-best forward is the one who’ll be on fire tonight. That’s the sort of direction in which this research is ultimately heading.

The preliminary research conducted by the team will be showcased at the 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in July 2021, though the results, everyone hopes, will be evident long before then.