We’re in a race for data.
Everyone is after more data on their athletes, patients, and themselves. Hawkin understands that as well as any company. As a company that enables data collection at scale, we’re obviously not unhappy about these developments.
But the race for more data also introduces more responsibility. If you’re using technology that generates and stores data somewhere, whether locally or in the cloud, there are some simple questions worth asking your provider. Who owns the data? Who can access it? What can it be used for? Can you take it with you? And just as importantly, can you trust the data you’re collecting in the first place?
Those questions matter in almost every industry, but in sports and healthcare they matter more. Our customers trust Hawkin with data about their athletes and patients. They trust us to collect it, manage it, protect it, and help turn it into something useful. We take that responsibility very seriously.
Their data is their data.
That sounds obvious. I think it should be.
We talk a lot at Hawkin about putting the customer first. That’s easy to say. What matters is whether it actually shows up in the decisions that get made. For us, that philosophy extends into everything we do, including how we think about data.
When someone uses Hawkin, they’re not just collecting a test. Over time, they’re building a record that becomes more valuable. An athlete might test in preseason and then throughout the season. Maybe they get injured, and now that same record includes rehabilitation and return-to-sport data. Then another preseason rolls around, and another season, soon it's several more years of training and competition.
One test can tell you something. Years of consistent data on the same athlete can tell you much more. Eventually, you can move beyond asking how someone compares to a population and start understanding what normal looks like for that individual. That is where longitudinal data becomes really valuable.
We’re being entrusted to help create and manage that record, but just because we're the technology company, doesn’t automatically make it our record. The customer owns the data. Our job is to be an excellent steward of it.
There’s another side to responsible data stewardship that I think is becoming increasingly important: the data has to be good.
More information collected by coaches, sports scientists, and clinicians is going to flow into athlete management systems, larger organizational datasets and AI systems. Those systems are only as useful as the information going into them.
A bad rep doesn’t become a good rep because AI analyzed it. A poorly collected test doesn’t become more useful because you put it into a database alongside a million other tests. More data isn’t necessarily better. More high-quality, validated data is. Professionals need to be able to trust the information they are working with.
We’ve spent nearly a decade collecting and analyzing force data at Hawkin, and along the way we’ve learned an enormous amount about what good data looks like, what can go wrong during collection, and when a practitioner should take a second look before accepting a result.
We’ve taken what we’ve learned and built it into what we believe is the best quality control engine in force measurement. Every test is analyzed for things that deserve another look, and when something comes up, we surface it to the practitioner so they can decide what to do with it. The goal isn’t to remove the practitioner from the decision. It’s to make it easier for good practitioners to apply their judgment with better information in front of them.
That thinking isn’t limited to Hawkin hardware. Hawkin is a software company as much as we are a hardware company, and we can analyze force data collected on other force plate systems. Ultimately, the important question isn’t whose hardware produced the measurement. The important question is whether you can trust the data.
If you’re building an athlete record that could follow someone for years and eventually feed into an athlete management system, an AI system, or a broader health and performance dataset, that matters a lot.
I’m optimistic about what AI can do in sports and healthcare. I think we’re going to be able to ask questions of our data that would have been incredibly difficult to answer even a few years ago.
But there’s a part of that conversation I think we’re skipping over. We spend a lot of time talking about what AI will be able to tell us and not enough time talking about what we’re feeding it.
If you’re going to use years of athlete or patient data to help inform training, rehabilitation or health decisions, you need confidence in the underlying record. Was the test performed correctly? Was the rep valid? Did something happen during collection that should make you question the result? Those questions are much easier to answer when the data is being collected, than years later after it has made its way through multiple systems.
This is why I think quality control at the individual-test level is going to become so important. Good decisions start with good data. As the systems analyzing our data become more powerful, the quality of the underlying data becomes more important, not less.
A force plate test is a measurement. Five or ten years of high-quality measurements on the same athlete is something completely different. It becomes a record of that athlete’s training, development, fatigue, injury, rehabilitation, return to sport and performance. In a clinical environment, it can become part of someone’s recovery story.
We’re only beginning to understand what will be possible when that clean longitudinal record can be connected with other information and analyzed using the next generation of tools. I find that incredibly exciting, but it also comes with responsibility.
At Hawkin, our view is pretty simple. The customer owns the data, and our job is to help make sure it’s the right data.
That’s what customer first means to us.
I started Hawkin because I believed better data, collected more often and put in the hands of good practitioners, could lead to better decisions. Nearly a decade later, I believe that more than ever. What’s changing is what we can do with that data.
AI, athlete management systems and connected datasets are going to give practitioners capabilities we could only imagine when we started. But none of it works without a foundation of high-quality data you can trust.
That’s where we think our responsibility starts. We want to help our customers collect better data, understand the quality of what they’ve collected, protect it, make it useful and make it work with the systems they choose. And through all of that, never lose sight of who it belongs to.
You.
Ben Watson is the founder and CEO of Hawkin