Neurotechnology for Sport

To improve your reaction time there are many methods available such as light systems, catching rulers, responding to audio cues from your coach, catching balls, and using strobe glasses. These are all great methods to improve your reaction time if you have limited resources.  One of the most important aspects of improving reaction time is having enough load on the brain to make significant lasting changes. So doing 10-20 reps of a reaction-based task is NOT going to be sufficient to make changes within the brain. Most research studies will perform cognitive tasks for 20 minutes or longer to induce high enough levels of mental fatigue. This would add up to 800 + or more repetitions!   In the brain, skills are not refined unless we perform a huge amount of reps and usually to fatigue. If you think about your sport, that’s how you arrived where you are today, you practiced over and over for years, performing hundreds of thousands of reps over that time. Reaction time is a sk...

With a now greater understanding of how the visual system influences athletic performance, eye tracking has become a point of fascination in high-performance  sport. However, the expense of implementing eye-tracking technology often  extremely high. T here are many commercially available eye-tracking systems out  there that will give sport scientists the data they need to analyze an athletes visual habits . We believe eye tracking is hugely undervalued as a real training tool and should form another piece of the puzzle in high-performance sports.  Soma Technologies focuses on providing a mobile, affordable eye tracking solution for teams, clubs and brands, making it easy to implement an eye tracking cognitive training solution into their environment.  Soma NPT Vision utilises existing eye tracking software in mobile devices, rather than reinventing the wheel and making new eye-tracking hardware and producing large screens. Using mobile devices is a far more pr...

Visual skills for Sports Sports vision training  helps an athlete improve their visual skills so they can process information faster, make more accurate decisions and see things without looking.  Smooth Pursuits Smooth pursuit movements are reflexive eye movements that are required when  an object through an environment. The eyes move smoothly instead of I  jump. Can your athlete accurately track an object while it is moving and at different speeds  without losing focus? This skill is very basic but many athletes lose focus and need  to re-fixate due to visual fatigue. Saccades A saccade is a quick, jerk-like, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two  or more points of fixation in the same direction. Switching your eyes quickly to a target is fairly straightforward forward but are you able to  do this at high speed and with accuracy? or does your athlete need to constantly re-fixate on the target? Are they over shooting or undershooting? The...

  How mental fatigue affects visual sustained attention Sustaining visual attention for long periods can induce high levels of mental fatigue which  leads to decreased speed in information evaluating and decision making against the stimuli. Results also showed that, overall, error rates and reaction times increased with Time on Task (ToT). Researchers concluded that attention was affected by mental fatigue, in the form of a decrease in the ability to suppress irrelevant information . In behavioural results, this was reflected by a tendency of participants to increasingly base their response decision on irrelevant information, resulting in decreased response accuracies. Until now  t here was no affordable mobile solution for  eye tracking training  for teams, coaches and athletes. This is why we developed  Soma NPT Vision . This brings the latest  eye tracking technology  to your mobile device so you can train sports vision anytime anywhere without...

  Mental fatigue induced by sports affects brain functions, especially cognitive processing ability. This study discusses the importance of managing mental fatigue in athletes today. While the factors involved in high pressure sport, (particularly at a more competitive level) are unavoidable, techniques in the management of athletes are often employed to help offset some mental fatigue and maintain health and performance. Currently when we look at high performance sport, athletes across the board are facing higher workload seasons, more games, more commitments associated with their sport, and less access to support networks or family and friends due to more frequent travel. Athletes thi s  year have faced unusual and stressful circumstances with the current pandemic and while travel may have been reduced, they face the stress and uncertainty of canceled competitions, qualifiers and reduced access to facilities and coaches. The capacity required to self motivate though such cir...

  Even with those that are trained to be super elite, mental fatigue impairs decision making at this high level. The stakes are high, and errors in these groups mean a lot more than a difference in a score board. Consider for a moment the importance of the decisions soldiers, first responders, emergency department staff, and even pilots make. When it comes to the safety of others, should’nt we be taking a deeper look into how mental fatigue training can potentially protect them from error? Prior Mental Fatigue Impairs Marksmanship Decision Performance Key Points: Marksmanship decision errors significantly increased after soldiers completed the mental fatigue intervention There was a significant negative correlation between shooting response time and errors of commission (r = −0.61; p = 0.004) when preceded by the mental fatigue intervention, but not the control Marksmanship judgment performance is significantly reduced when soldiers are mentally fatigued Purpose: Mental fatigue has...