Article Text

Download PDFPDF
P-22 Using mobile devices to monitor health and wellbeing, in and out of competition, in elite international womens soccer
  1. Andrew D White1,
  2. Michael M McKenna1,
  3. Mark W Dixon1,
  4. Oliver GD Davies1,2,
  5. Stephen H Boyce1,2,3,
  6. Niall Elliott1
  1. 1SportScotland Institute of Sport, Stirling, UK
  2. 2Scottish Football Association, Glasgow, Scotland
  3. 3Emergency Department, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Scotland

Abstract

Background In recent years mobile devices (smartphones) have been used to gather subjective and objective international athlete health and wellbeing data via athlete self-report measures (ASRM’s).

Aim To implement a system of ASRM’s in elite women’s international soccer players.

Method ASRM’s require players to rate their perceived level of fatigue, motivation, stress, sleep quality on a 10 point scale and objective data such as sleep hours, illness/injury and menstrual cycle. The Scotland women’s national soccer team were asked to provide this data on a daily basis via a hand held mobile device both during periods of international duty and when with their domestic clubs.

Results 26 international soccer players compiled this data over a period of six months. The adherence rate overall was 48% (home based players 64%, exiles 38%). Strengths of this process include decreased administration time for support staff, quantification of athlete wellbeing providing the ability to analyse this longitudinally and decrease both observer and peer bias. Weaknesses of this form of data collection include poor compliance, unstandardised timing of completion and decreased face-to-face conversations leading to a reduction in the identification of changes to body language.

Conclusion ASRM’s have proved an invaluable tool for the quantification of health and wellbeing within the Scottish women’s national soccer team. They have provided important initial ‘red flags’ for many illness and injury situations during international and club duty. However, they cannot remove face-to-face wellbeing conversations completely and require practitioners to communicate the results obtained from ASRMs for continued athlete buy-in.

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.