How an injury led to new technology set to transform sports rehab
The Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides may not be one of global sport’s hotbeds but if Jodie Sinclair has her way, it will have witnessed the kernel of an idea set to transform sporting competition.
It all started with her older brother, who used her as a makeshift goalkeeper and target when he played football in the garden.
Jodie explained: “I joined a football team, the one my brother was part of so from a very young age I was in a competitive environment and getting monitored.
“In my early teens, there was no women’s team to play for, so I played for the guys’ team and I was the only woman on it, so that was a challenge in itself, being the only female on a pitch with teenage boys.
“Then when I was in my third year at high school we had a PE teacher join the school and he asked me and my pals if we wanted to play rugby. We just laughed at him because we had no idea how to play rugby.
“He said it would be fun and just five weeks later he told us that we'd been entered into our first rugby sevens competition. We thought he was kidding because we barely knew how to hold a rugby ball.
“We were all athletes and we were fast and were taught to ‘hit the spaces, not the faces’, in other words running through the gaps.
“We played our games and then went off to Nando's at the end of the competition and got a phone call asking where we were. We were told we had to come back to collect our trophy because we’d won the competition and we had no idea.
“We’d played Murrayfield Wanderers who train every day, so they weren't happy!”
Sporting success continued for Jodie and she been scouted for a sports scholarship in the United States at the end of her school studies when disaster struck.
“The week before starting university I was skating on my longboard going down a steep slope by a carpark. There was a sharp exit from the carpark and I realised I was going to hit the kerb and so I jumped off.
“Sadly one foot came off the board and the other didn’t, meaning one foot hit a static ground and the other kept going at full speed.I dislocated my knee, ruptured the ACL, fractured the tibia, tore the meniscus: basically everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong in a split second.
“Being an athlete was such a big part of my personality but for three years I couldn’t do any sport and I really struggled with depression, with frustration. Essentially I had an identity crisis, going from peak performance and training and competing six to seven times a week to my physiotherapist telling me to sit in a chair and try and lift my leg up.”
Despite the personal challenges, Jodie decided to use her free time to identify a new route into university and was attracted to Dundee’s Industrial and Product Design degree and spent a year out after school building a portfolio that would secure her eligibility for the course.
The injury and how she was treated prompted Jodie to come up with a solution.
Theo is smart clothing and an app that tracks and analyses muscle performance and provides information for performances coaches and physiotherapists to help provide a greater insight into training and recovery as well as track the athlete’s mental health, which Jodie felt would be invaluable.
She explained: “While I was doing my course and going through the rehab, my physio was asking me how I’d been getting on with my exercises for the last week and I’d say I've been good or I've been fine, but how can they use that to work out my recovery? My level of good and your good are different, with different pain thresholds and how comfortable you are sharing with your physio.
“We have so much access to data and yet physios are still relying on qualitative data, which is very subjective.“
Jodie spent the Covid-19 lockdowns learning about business and figuring out how to make Theo commercially viable, sourcing developers to help with the technology.
She added: “My lecturers wanted it to be a hyper-focused ACL recovery device but now, it’s not focusing acutely on the recovery side but providing a collection of comparative biometric data and performance analysis.
“That can enhance athletes’ training, prevent them from overtraining and also prevent future injuries and thus that time out of play.
“Performance coaches can get their entire team under one platform and see who's performing, who's not performing, and also monitor the mental well-being of the athletes, because in the elite sporting world, mental health is completely overlooked.”
Jodie is currently collaborating with Ivy League universities in the United States and plans to focus on that market when the product launches in the next 12-18 months.
“We will start by launching B2B, focusing on the teams and in particular, college sports teams. Over in the US, it's a $17 billion market, so it would be foolish not to go into it and the teams that work with us are going to have a competitive advantage.
“Theo will be used by lead performance coaches and potentially the physios as well.
“I see from the people I am meeting around the world that elite sport looks into minute data and how it can affect performance and it makes me more excited that I have created something that can help them.
“In a few years, when we have gone direct to consumer, I want Theo to be a household name like Strava, for instance, to help elite and amateur athletes monitor their performance and PBs. Essentially Theo will be your training buddy.”
For more information, please visit www.theohealth.com