#046 Monday Minutes: Concerns Surrounding Non-deidentified Biometric Data & Regulation Implications

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Monday Minute theme and discussing a concerning trend that I've noticed over the last several months on social media. Much of this show revolves around ethics surrounding biometric data and student-athlete information contained in dashboards and visuals that is widely distributed on social media.

As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

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Key Takeaways

• A concerning trend on social media: dashboards and visuals containing non-deidentified biometric data and student-athlete information are being widely distributed.
• The episode raises ethics and regulation questions around how athlete data is shared publicly by practitioners.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Coating Excellence Show. Hey everybody, this is your host Adam Ringler, and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minutes. It is a brief five to ten minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry. Things were reading, things were checking out, things that we are experimenting

[00:00:50] With, exploring, and it is meant to just be a quick little summary, little tidbits, little breadcrumbs of things that are happening around our strength, conditioning, and high performance industry. Like always, if you enjoy the show, there's a couple ways that you can support it. The very first thing I would recommend is please head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Pop in your email, I promise I won't spam you, and occasionally about once a

[00:01:19] Month, I'll send you an email, it will be things that I'm reading almost like a monthly recap of these Monday Minute episodes. I think you'll get a lot out of it. I explained to my friends that it is essentially the birch box of newsletters. You don't know what you're going to get, but you know whatever you receive is going to be chock full of great information. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter.

[00:01:45] Hey everybody, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minute's edition. It is October and it is the 21st, and we are coming to you live today. I'm recording this and going to distribute it today as well. But today, rather than doing the question-and-answer sessions, I thought I would get behind the microphone. It's been a while actually. It's been, uh, it's been nearly a month, and I will tell you within this show why we've had such a long hiatus.

[00:02:14] It seems like I always have a hiatus with the Decoding Excellence Show. It's sort of on and off, but hopefully we are more on than we are actually off the air. So I, again, I commend you, thank you, first continuing to support the Decoding Excellence Show, continuing to support what we're bringing to the masses when it comes to sports science and discussion around the strength conditioning industry and some of the topics and the conversation points that

[00:02:39] We like to bring up. But this Monday Minute's edition is more so about kind of catching up, seeing what we're up to and what we're doing and what I'm particularly exploring within our current state of what we're doing here in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. So without further ado, here is my Monday Minutes. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's Decoding Excellence Show. I'm your host, as always, Adam Ringler. And today is a Monday Minutes episode, rather

[00:03:08] Than doing a Q&A session, I thought I would just sort of get behind the microphone and wrap a little bit. I had a lot of conversations over the last couple of weeks, sort of growing a little bit more active on Instagram and elsewhere. But the reason I've done this is just sort of invokes some different conversations with other people. One of the things that I shared, I think it was particularly even yesterday, it was a Sunday, that I think has resonated with

[00:03:35] Quite a few people is the idea of sharing biometric data online via social media. I was a proponent of saying this is a bad idea, very bad idea, rather. So I wanted to kind of take a moment and talk about where this thought and this idea came from. So one of the things I've seen a lot on social media is that practitioners are widely just sharing screenshots of different dashboards. And look, I make no ifs or qualms about it, like I try to share my work that's something I

[00:04:10] Fundamentally agree with, I believe in is that you can share your work and you can try to help the industry by exposing some different methods and exposing different best practices of what you're doing versus what other people are doing. And that helps grow the industry. It allows for other people to see what you're doing and try to grow and adapt and develop their own best practices where I get a little frustrated with our sports science industry is

[00:04:36] When you are sharing and you're attaching student athletes names to it. I think that is especially dangerous in this landscape of where we live in right now. So and what I mean by that is that sports biometric data is widely unregulated right now within the NCAA. And as a as a technologist, if you will, right, as sports scientists, as a strength edition and coach, I love and lean into that, right, that we can equip their athletes with wearable tech, right,

[00:05:10] Accelerometers and heart rate monitors and we can do force outputs and we can use Nordboards and vaude performance and and all of the great performance technologies that we have. I think that's awesome, right, especially as we start to even dive under the hood and we start looking at like again, like biometric, you know, blood labs, things like that. That is awesome. Where I get very concerned with and what I get very concerned with is when we start to share

[00:05:39] Those things, you share your work, but it has athletes names on it. And why I become concerned about that? Let me tell you a number of reasons. Number one, if we want biometric data regulation, that's the route we go, right? So as it is a very unregulated field right now, and we have a lot of liberty to lean into those technologies and use them and harness them. I also think we have a great responsibility to use it in a way that protects the well-being and protects the

[00:06:11] Student athlete. And I don't necessarily know if sharing that information, widely on social media, in an effort to show your work or whatever, if that is protecting the well-being of our student athletes, right? So one of the things that I really try to do is I try to anonymize and I try to de-identify most of the information, not even most. Let's just be, let's call a spade a spade, all of the information that is ever shown online, right? This is sensitive

[00:06:45] Information. It is their data. As much as we use it, we have a repository and athlete management system that is highly, highly encrypted and regulated and HIPAA and HIPAA compliant and all these different sort of compliances that we've set up for it and for the safeguarding of student athlete data. We have a responsibility to not breach that, right? And I see it so often online and it disturbs me. It makes me not just cringe but it makes me

[00:07:21] Very worried because again, I think we have equipped it. We've created such a low barrier for our industry, for sports scientists and practitioners and strength coaches and everybody else to do some really cool things and gather some really great insights about athletes and how they're responding to training stress and all that. But what we haven't done a good enough job and I point the finger back at me, right? And back at our industry is really being

[00:07:53] Clear and concise about the ethical responsibilities that we have with the data that we collect. It's far way too easy to collect information. It's a whole another thing to be really ironing out how we safeguard that information, how we encrypt that information, how do we data warehouse that information, who within the organization has permission to that. And we need to really, really think about the ethics and the responsibility that we have with that data because

[00:08:27] It's important. It's important because we're not just talking about trade secrets. We're not talking about best practices. We're talking about real life data, biometric data, real life implications that it has to student athletes, especially when we start to discuss athletes that have a possibility of going on to play professionally in whatever capacity athletes that may have a opportunity to go on and compete for their country, whether it's, you know,

[00:08:56] Olympics or junior Olympics or elsewhere. All of these things are really, really important when we start to think about who gets access to what information and how is it communicated, shared, protected, and warehouse in a way that is protecting the sanctity of that information. I could go on non. I find this absolutely fascinating. And but also really, you know, we owe it to our athletes that we work with. If we're going to ask them to wear

[00:09:26] Accelerometers, if we're going to ask them to partake in, you know, blood draws or anything like that, where we're looking at anything that might be sensitive to their medical or performance outcomes, then we need to do a better job at making sure that we protect that data from outside influences and people that shouldn't be otherwise viewing that information. And so there there goes obviously, the importance of perhaps not sharing non-deidentified information via

[00:09:56] Social media or whether it's on Instagram or Twitter or elsewhere. It's really, really important to protect that. Secondly, I go on and on about this topic because I think it's really, really important. Secondly, another thing that I alluded to on the opener here on the decoding excellence show is why I've taken such a hiatus away from the decoding excellence show. And there's another good reason outside of deidentified and and hashed student athlete KPI's and metrics is

[00:10:30] That over the last several several weeks, what we've undertaken is a massive migration within our athlete management system from one system to another. And we're talking to the tune of 1.5 million different individual data points, 900 different data items from quantifiable, you know, workload monitoring technologies, RPEs, well-being metrics, sleep, the list goes on and on about what we're performance profiles, things like that. So this has been a daunting task, but

[00:11:09] It's been a really fruitful task in that it's given me, provided me an opportunity to really from a conceptual high-level macro 30,000-foot view, fundamentally ask what questions are important within our own organization? And when I've asked that, you know, we start to go down this rabbit hole of how do we best answer those questions? And what what departments are best equipped to answer those questions? Because let's be honest, strength conditioning or sports

[00:11:42] Performance is not a one-size-fits-all. We are not a panacea for every sport performance outcome. Well, sometimes it's a nutritional intervention that works well. Sometimes it's a sports psychology intervention that is needed. Sometimes it's a athletic medicine outcome that is needed. Sometimes it's a talent identification solution that is needed. So there's a number of different facets and avenues that we must go down in order to engineer elite athletes and

[00:12:10] Elite athletic programs. And so having this opportunity of really looking at all of our KPIs, all of our metrics, all of what each individual department is collecting and monitoring and assessing really has allowed me to, you know, look at the frequency counts of some of these metrics and understand that, you know, of the 900, what are really important? Right? Out of the 900 are 200 metrics more important than the other remaining, you know, 700 metrics that we might be

[00:12:42] Collecting. And of those 200, which actually have merit, which actually are regularly or routinely asked to the student athletes or of our various programs. And so this has allowed us an opportunity to really audit our process, our athlete management system and see what can we do better, what questions are we not even asking? What technologies do we need to continue to invest in in order to be able to answer the questions, the research questions

[00:13:09] That we have organizationally? And what do we need to do to really equip our athletes and the best opportunity to succeed here at Colorado and elsewhere? So it's been a, to be honest, it's been a very daunting task of having to go through a lot of these KPIs and and measure them and monitor them and, you know, obviously migrate them from one platform to another. But it's been one that has been something that is I'm insanely passionate about. I think, you

[00:13:37] Know, if you've listened to the interview with Jay Demayo on the CVASP podcast outside the rack, you know, I alluded to it that I'm working on this project that's, you know, taking a lot of my attention, a lot of my focus on my energy. And I'm looking for avenues of decompressing away from it and relaxing and escaping from some respects. Some of these tasks and objectives I've had. And if you've listened to the way that I responded to that question,

[00:14:05] I said, look, I'm, you know, I'm really passionate about this. And I'm going down this rabbit hole. And, you know, at some point in time, I recognize that the sprint in this project will be over. It will be exhausted at the finish line. And then I'll be looking at having some R&R. So, you know, wow, it's been a daunting and audacious task of doing all of this. We are really, really excited. We're gaining traction in this project. And it is,

[00:14:32] It's actually exceeding my expectations some days. I feel like we're moving incredibly slow. And other days, I take a step back and look at it through the lens and the perspective of an outsider. And I say, we're doing some really novel things that a lot of organizations aren't doing. And we're asking some really important questions. And I think that, you know, we'll be in a position, you know, anywhere from six weeks, six months, and hopefully six

[00:14:55] Years, where we're, we're confidently answering those and really leading, leading the charge and doing some really innovative and exciting things for the sport, sport industry. Outside of that, really, it's been just enjoying sunny, you know, sunny, sunshine, full, border Colorado. We're in the heart of, you know, obviously our fall training. Anybody that's in strength, conditioning understands that the fall schedule is crazy. It's busy. It's

[00:15:22] Chaotic. You know, I got two young kids that are also in school at this time. So they are both going through, you know, first grade and preschool. So it is, it's a hectic season with these, these objectives and some of these projects that we're, we're undertaking. But at the same time, it's one that's really exciting and, and one that's just a really fun fall right now. I'd like to say that our teams are off to some success. You know, had you ask me that

[00:15:52] Maybe six weeks ago, if my response could have been very different or four weeks ago, it could have been different. But, you know, we, we feel like we're in an opportunity to win. And that's, you know, that's all I can ask for as a sports performance coach is to position athletes in a healthy state and a state where they have the opportunity to seize victory and compete and win and not only matches and games and competitions, but also championships and

[00:16:18] That's what we're obviously building towards and positioning our teams to to obviously do, do such in a postseason run. So don't want to get too far ahead of myself on that. But it's been a fun and exciting fall semester. And ultimately, I'm hoping that we can bring some more guests on the Decoding Excellence Show to talk about sports science in our state of our industry, strengthening conditioning, the X's and the O's, the chalk and the dust, the

[00:16:46] Steel, what we're doing in the rack, but what we're also doing outside of the rack, you really start to talk about other integrations within sports science and performance technologies. You know, we spent so much time talking about force analysis with our dual force plates and and vaude performance technologies who have, you know, I've alluded to a lot on the show openers, especially early in the early days of the Decoding Excellence Shows. But, you

[00:17:09] Know, the new motion capture system that we have to assess joint ranges of motion and movement kinematics and bio mechanical analysis is really exciting brings me back to my early bio mechanical days at Michigan State University and taking some of those classes with with who was otherwise my graduate advisor back in the day. So it's it's really coming full circle on some of the things that we're doing and how we're trying to assess total body joint

[00:17:36] Ranges of motions and assess a movement quality and a movement index in addition to some of the performance indexes. But I am looking forward to having more guests on the shows. And if there's people that you want to recommend to join me on the Decoding Excellence Show, please send me a Instagram or a Twitter message or Facebook message. Go to Adam Ringler.com forward slash social check that out there and sign up for the messenger and

[00:18:04] Shoot me a message and tell me those recommendations. I'll reach out to them immediately if they are within the industry or they're with you know outside of the industry. I don't care if there's a lesson to learn then there is a microphone that I would love for them to get behind so that we can distill some of the wisdom, some lessons, some of the tactics and tools that they use to succeed in their own avenue of of life. So I think that's going to wrap up

[00:18:32] This Decoding Excellence Show. As always, thank you so much for supporting the show, especially through the the ebbs and the flows, the the days, the sprints where we have multiple episodes and posts and those that weeks go by without an episode will continue to try to be more consistent. But at the same time, I know that life interferes quite frequently. And if I don't get an episode out next week, I, you know, I'm sorry. I have a full support science and strength

[00:19:00] In additioning responsibility as well as trying to be the best father I can be and the best husband I can be and manage a life as well. But until next time, thank you. Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this Monday minutes show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam

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[00:21:27] Coffee. Otherwise, please head over, check it out. It is buy me a coffee dot com forward slash Adam Wrangler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the decoding excellence show.