Safety Summit: Equine 'Fitbit' devices could identify racehorses with problems
LEXINGTON, Ky. – Wearable devices gathering data on horses’ vital signs and the characteristics of their strides have begun demonstrating promising new avenues to determine horses at risk of injury, according to speakers at the Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit on Wednesday.
The equine devices, akin to those in widespread use in human athletics and among everyday people seeking to improve their health and fitness outcomes, can measure a horse’s heart rate and its stride length, along with the concussive forces generated by each limb during high-speed exercise, among a plethora of other data sets.
They can also be used to measure any rapid changes in the collected data and be combined with artificial-intelligence programs to refine the results, developments that could lead to powerful tools to identify horses that are experiencing problems that put them at risk of suffering a catastrophic breakdown or a serious cardiac event, speakers at the summit discussing the devices claimed.
Dr. Scott Palmer, the equine medical director of the New York Gaming Commission, discussed the results of a recent study the commission has conducted using a wearable device that measures the characteristics of horses’ strides and the forces felt by both the hind limbs and forelimbs during contact with the ground. The experiment began at last year’s Saratoga meet and continued through the fall Belmont meet and the winter-spring Aqueduct meet.
The sensor is designed to compare the data it obtains to baselines for both the overall population of horses and the specific horse being measure. Any data that is consistently outside three standard deviations generates a so-called “red alert” showing that the horse has modified its stride in a way that, to the view of Palmer, should at least generate a discussion with the trainer.
Palmer said that the discussion would be justified by follow-up data on the Saratoga horses that showed a significant drop-off in racing and training activity after generating a “red-alert” race on the device. But he also said it’s important that regulators realize the limits of the data and not take an “adversarial approach” with horsemen, because the data is showing things that “trainers can’t see, that jockeys can’t feel, that’s not obvious at all.”
“This device allows us to identify soundness issues very early,” he said. “But it can’t identify what that issue is. So you have to tell the trainer, ‘Your horse had a red-alert performance. This is what that means. This is what that doesn’t mean. And this is what you need to do about it.' Because that’s actionable intelligence, right now.”
Will Duff Gordon, the chief executive officer of Total Performance Data, a British company that collects GPS-type data on racing statistics, said that he believes younger trainers in Britain are using wearable devices to obtain heart-rate and stride-length data on young horses offered at auction to improve their ability to identify good athletes. They are also using those wearable devices to better train their horses and identify the race distance and racing surfaces that would best suit their horses.
As for Total Performance Data, which also has a contract with Equibase to collect data at a handful of U.S. racetracks, Gordon said that the company’s racing data may also contain indications that a horse may be performing sub-optimally due to a health issue. But the company, which produces data that is principally used for handicapping products, has not yet delved deeply into the different ways to look at the data, Gordon said.
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“The last few years has been about acquiring the data. The present and future is about mining that data,” Gordon said. “And so the question is, can we adapt our huge data set for a welfare point of view?”
Valentin Rapin, the founder of a French company, Arioneo, that developed and markets the Equimetre wearable device for Thoroughbred and Standardbred horses (it attaches to the girth), said on the panel that 400 trainers worldwide use his company’s product. The product measures heart rates, generates electrocardiograms, and collects constant data on speed and stride length, among other data sets. He said the device could easily identify “abnormalities” or “cardiac arrhythmias.”
Dr. Palmer said that the rapid progress in the technology for wearable devices is giving him hope that the racing industry can make significant strides in reducing injuries.
“I’m confident we’re going to learn a lot from this data,” Dr. Palmer said. “Because right now I can say that I want a sensor on every horse. …. I think our fatality rates will drop way down, and I think our attrition rates will go way down.”