Biometric-device vendors discuss their products at Welfare and Safety Summit
LEXINGTON, Ky. – The growing importance and prevalence of biometric devices to evaluate a horse’s soundness and fitness was made starkly evident on the final day of the Welfare and Safety of Racehorse Summit on Tuesday when six vendors were given a half hour each to explain their products.
Although the first biometric devices for horses were developed more than a decade ago, the sensors became prevalent in U.S. racing just after the onset of the COVID pandemic. Since then, the devices have been embraced in several major racing jurisdictions, including Kentucky, where every track in the state requires horses to wear one during a race. A class of the devices was also the subject of a major study last year conducted by the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP).
Generally, biometric devices are designed to record chronic stride abnormalities and pick up sudden changes in gait (among other features), both of which can be indicators of unsoundness or future injury. Some of the devices are worn during exercise, while others use real-time video analysis to identify gait asymmetries or lameness. One product combines both.
In some jurisdictions, the wearable devices have already become popular among individual trainers, who have said that the sensors allow them to better understand the athletic traits and abilities of their horses, as well as monitor for potential injuries. Repeated use of the sensors during training and racing allows horsemen to track how a horse’s stride and fitness are changing over time.
In a relatively short period, the capabilities of the sensors to flag problematic changes in a horse’s stride have been validated. In the AAEP study, which used data from 4,200 high-speed exercise sessions, horses flagged as being at high or moderate risk of a future injury were approximately twice as likely to suffer an injury than horses deemed to be at lowest risk. The study used data from four different vendors of wearable biometric sensors.
“The study demonstrated that these high-tech tools show promise as a detection system for musculoskeletal injury in racehorses and can serve as an effective complement to the existing oversight provided by veterinarians and trainers,” the AAEP said in a release announcing the findings earlier this year.
Developers of the devices have hyped up the capabilities of the sensors for several years, sometimes in hyperbolic terms.
Dr. David Lambert, the founder of StrideSafe, said during his presentation on Tuesday that universal adoption of the sensors will make bone fractures “a thing of the past.”
“These problems will go away,” Lambert said. “That is not an outlandish statement.”
The market for the sensors is, obviously, enormous. Thoroughbred horses around the world, when viewed as collections of datapoints, are identical creatures, and the wide adoption of the sensors and the software powering their analytics could provide significant revenue to any successful vendors. Earlier this year, StrideSafe purchased an Australian competitor, Stride Master, in a bid to increase market share and consolidate its manufacturing.
In New York and other racing jurisdictions, regulatory veterinarians are already using an app called Sleip during their pre-race examinations to better identify lameness. The app, which can be installed on a phone or a tablet, looks for gait abnormalities during a horse’s trot, and the app can compare a horse’s real-time gait to historical analyses of the same horse.
Dr. Jamie Textor, a veterinarian based in Northern California who is a marketing officer for Sleip, said during her presentation at the summit on Tuesday that the app is only a “tool” to help evaluate lameness, but she also used language common among the developers of data-analysis products.
“Why do we use data?” Textor said. “Well, because data is going to be superior to our memory and biases.”
Still, one of the lingering problems with the technologies is that far more horses are being flagged for gait abnormalities than those that will go on to suffer an injury in the near future. That has led many horsemen to view the use of the technologies with caution, at a time when race-day scratches have become a flashpoint between regulatory vets and horsemen.
Dr. Kevin Keegan, a University of Missouri professor who is the founder of a lameness detection system called Equinosis, contended during a presentation on Tuesday that an analysis of the data in recent studies showed that one horse was injured out of every 23 that were flagged for high risk.
For horseman, that means that a flagged horse might be pulled out of a race despite the fact it remains at low risk for catastrophic injury when viewed in the statistical context of the current overall fatality rate in the United States of one horse per 1,000 starts.
“False positives can cause harm, and we have to realize this,” Keegan said, while advocating for a multi-modal evaluation of risk. “We cannot detect a one-in-1,000 event with a single measurement.”
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