4c Sports wants to stop preventable injuries from ending athletic participation at all levels of sport. We provide baseline and post-injury biomechanical and postural sway assessments along with corrective exercise programming in order to help prevent orthopedic injuries before they happen and aid in return-to-play decision making when injuries do occur.
Unlike other techniques of assessing balance, such as judging how well an athlete can maintain a difficult single-leg stance, our system provides highly sensitive measurements of postural sway, the amount and pattern of movement that naturally occurs while maintaining a stable upright position.
With only a lightweight force plate and a laptop, our system can travel anywhere and be up and running in minutes. As part of our service, we provide teams and organizations with their own hardware and maintenance agreement, providing the ability to capture data immediately, when it’s needed most.
Our evaluations of postural control put minimal cognitive stress on an athlete and can be used repeatedly in the time period following an injury to help judge progress in the return to health. We provide a scoring relative to baseline values so it’s easy to see when an athlete is back within a normal range of variance.
Our system is intended to identify risky movement patterns before injury occurs, a process we demonstrated successfully in a pilot program with a few select university athletic departments. We combine extensive research of kinematic and epidemiology risk factors with state-of-the-art technology to assess an athlete’s potential to sustain specific non-contact injuries — those injuries generally caused by over stressing one area to make up for a weakness in another.
Once we’ve identified which areas an individual athlete has to improve, we provide the tools so they can do the work to make themselves stronger and more efficient; reducing their risk of injury and increasing their performance.
In a team setting, we provide data that athletic trainers and strength coaches can use to correct biomechanical imbalances using any method they deem appropriate, while for individual athletes we provide exercise programming and personal follow-up.
Markerless motion capture technology lets us evaluate more athletes in less time without any fussing over marker placement. With nothing to put on and nothing to fall off, each athlete can complete our biomechanical assessment in about 10 minutes.
Teams and organizations get the data they need, without having to staff, fill, or maintain an expensive performance lab. We bring our system to our clients and provide a Web interface to the results — giving athletic training staff the data they need without worrying over the logistics of acquiring, storing and organizing it.
We use 8 cameras placed around the athlete at varying heights to capture a complete 360-degree spherical perspective of each movement which we then use to create a 3-dimensional model of each rep. By generating measurements from the model rather than finding bony markers on a video still, we create repeatable results time after time. Our software calculates range of motion measurements for every angle, in every frame.