Cricket Injury Prediction and Surveillence by Mobile Application

Technology on Smartphones

Najeebullah Soomro

, Habib Noorbhai

, Mariam Soomro

, Meraj M. A. Chhaya

and Ross Sanders

Discipline of Exercise and Sport Science, Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney,

Lidcombe, NSW, Australia

Department of Sport Management, Faculty of Business, Cape Peninsula University of Technology,

Cape Town, South Africa

APPNA Institute of Public Health, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, Karachi, Pakistan

Academy of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Keywords: Cricket, Injury Surveillance, Mobile Application, CricketPredict.

Abstract: Name of the mobile Application: CricketPredict.

Category of the mobile Application Health and Fitness: Platform Android 4.0 or later, Cost Free.

The aim of this paper is to present the methodology for the development of a mobile App on injury

surveillance and workload monitoring in Cricket. This technology is not available for complimentary use to

the general public; therefore this App can assist in capturing injury data at all levels of cricket electronically.

The CricketPredict mobile App for Android smartphones was developed using three languages C++, Qt

Modeling Language (QML) and JavaScript.

CricketPredict is the first complimentary mobile App that can record injuries in cricket through a smartphone.

The injury questionnaire is tailored to cricket and the App can also record batting and bowling workloads,

which can be risk factors for injury. The App can be used without the need of supplementary computer devices

for synchronization, making its usage practical on the cricket field.

Electronic injury surveillance systems have been shown improve data collection during competitive sport.

Therefore CricketPredict mobile App may assist in better reporting of injuries at junior level and may also

act as a monitoring system for coaching staff to adjust training workloads of individual players.

1 INTRODUCTION

Emerging technologies are creating new

opportunities to apply science and medicine to high

performance sports (HPS) (Speed, Roberts 2010)

Multiple sports have used technology to monitor and

predict injuries in sports (Karlsson, 2015).

Electronic injury surveillance and monitoring

tools are also used in cricket, for example, Cricket

Australia (CA) uses the Athlete Management System

(AMS) for workload monitoring and injury reporting

for their contracted players. There is a high burden of

injury at the junior levels of cricket; a five year

investigation of injuries in elite junior cricketers in

South Africa indicated that 27% of the cricketers

sustained injuries (Stretch 2014). Since there are no

structured electronic monitoring mechanisms

available at the junior levels therefore it is important

to develop a system to track injuries and workloads at

the junior level.

Monitoring training workload by using subjective

measures from an athlete is shown to be an effective

way to address the issue to training load

quantification in sports (Saw et al. 2015). Considering

this evidence, if players can record their bowling and

batting workloads it may assist to reduce the burden

of overuse injuries. Currently there are no

complimentary mobile Apps available in the public

domain which can record cricket related injuries and

monitor workload, therefore development of one is

necessary.

The aim of this paper is to define and describe the

novel methodology and protocols associated with the

development of CricketPredict, a complimentary and

easy to use smartphone based Mobile App for

monitoring injuries and workloads at community

level.

Soomro, N., Noorbhai, H., Soomro, M., Chayya, M. and Sanders, R..

CRICKET INJURY PREDICTION AND SURVEILLENCE BY MOBILE APPLICATION TECHNOLOGY ON SMARTPHONES.

2 METHODS

The CricketPredict software system design was

conceptualized to be divided into three components:

a player interface, a coach interface, and a back-end

system that securely stores all the data. The design of

the software relies on client-server architecture, with

the player and coach interfaces operating as clients

and the back-end system operating as the server

(resource and service provider). The implementation-

level details are expanded in the following sub-

sections.

The client-side has been built in a manner that can

simplify porting it to diverse smartphone operating-

systems, with the initial release aimed at the larger

Android ecosystem. The server-side of CricketPredict

was implemented to also be compatible with various

server operating systems, in order to reduce

dependability upon a single technology. Qt 5.3, which

is an open-source software development platform,

was chosen to program the functionality of the client-

side software because of its cross-platform

compatibility (ability to work on multiple operating

systems). This means that even though the initial

release is compatible with Android only, the source

code can later be ported to 15 other operating systems

with relative ease. The aforementioned platform and

languages simplify the construction of custom-user

interfaces, and provide the opportunity to augment

user-interface components with high-level logic.

PHP, a cross-platform server-side scripting language

was used as a server.

The user interface provides an injury recording

tool based on Finch et al. 2010. The form has

questions on the activity at the time of injury, reason

for presentation, site of injury, nature and mechanism

of injury, etc. Injury reporting forms appearing the

player’s interface are shown in Figures 1. The App

also records workloads for batting and bowling. For

batting, the number of balls batted was the primary

input and for bowling the number of balls bowled was

the primary input

3 CONCLUSIONS

Use of eHealth and online technology to monitor and

track athlete’s health has been identified as an area

that can revolutionize Sports Medicine (Verhagen et

al. 2014). The development of CricketPredict Mobile

App was inspired by this concept and is the first

complimentary Mobile App that can record injuries in

cricket through a smartphone without the need for

connectivity from parent software on computers.

The

App was tested multiple times by the developers,

players at the University of Sydney Cricket team and

random users. The data collected by the App was

cross verified with the data stored on the server by the

developers and the results showed that 100% data

accuracy. User reviews were collected from five

ransom testers who rated the user –friendliness of the

App as 8.2/10.

Figure 1: Injury reporting tab on the player’s interface.

REFERENCES

Karlsson D. Electronic Data Capture for Injury and Illness

Surveillance: A usability study. Department of

Computer and Information Science, Linköping

University ISRN: LIU-IDA/KOGVET-A--13/014

Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB. Monitoring the athlete

training response: subjective self-reported measures

trump commonly used objective measures: a systematic

review. British Journal of Sports Medicine

2015:bjsports-2015-094758

Speed C, Roberts W. Innovation in high-performance sports

medicine. British Journal of Sports Medicine

2010:bjsports75374

Stretch RA. Junior cricketers are not a smaller version of

adult cricketers: A 5-year investigation of injuries in

elite junior cricketers. South African Journal of Sports

Medicine 2014;26(4):123-27

Verhagen E, Bolling C. Protecting the health of the@ hlete:

how online technology may aid our common goal to

prevent injury and illness in sport. British Journal of

Sports Medicine 2015:bjsports-2014-094322