Wearable sensor from
McLaren Applied
Technologies
“ It started off with us saying, ‘Well, if you can
continuously develop a Formula 1 car by using real-time
data insight and being predictive about the outcome of
the race, why wouldn’t you do that for a human...?’”
—Duncan Bradley, health unit business director at McLaren Applied Technologies
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op a Formula 1 car by using real-time data insight
and being predictive about the outcome of the
race, why wouldn’t you do that for a human, swapping
the race outcome for a health outcome?’”
Bradley explains.
And in fact, roughly 10 years ago, McLaren Applied
Technologies started applying the same scalable
data analytics technology used to understand
F1 cars to better understand the human element
of the race: McLaren’s Formula 1 drivers. Bradley
points out that understanding the makeup of a
driver goes well beyond his natural driving skills to
include movement, recovery, nutrition, and cognition.
“We track, monitor, and predict all the key
health and wellness indicators that a driver needs
to be able to perform at his best over season and
create personalized interventions and programs.”
The data collected from biometric sensors enables
McLaren Applied Technologies to understand
each driver’s body and personalize training programs
over the course of a race season, but these
same insights are directly applicable to the general
population. “In the F1 world, it’s all about maximizing
race performance, but in healthcare it could be
recovering from a surgical procedure, managing
a disease or weight loss, or running a marathon,”
Bradley says. “Whilst the field of application is
quite different, the technology and approach underpinning
our digital health and wellness business
is quite similar, directly taken from what we have
learned over the years of going racing.”
According to Bradley, the healthcare industry is
at a pivotal point where it can benefit from adopting
such innovative technologies, with a growing
requirement for evidence-based, predictive insight
to improve our well-being coupled with the availability
of more high-quality human data. “Thanks
to investment in motorsport, a highly-competitive
environment with a cutting-edge technology focus,
the racing world saw a digital revolution before many
other industries and learned a lot about handling
data to drive decision-making,” he says, “but what