What it is

“Are they ready to return?” is the question every rehabilitation runs toward — and it is too often answered by feel. Return-to-play monitoring is our research program for answering it with measurement: the athlete’s pre-injury movement signatures form the baseline, every rehabilitation session is measured as a distance from it, and progress is that distance closing, week by week.

The reference point matters. Not a population norm, not the uninjured side alone — the player’s own documented movement from before the injury. “Back to normal” is defined by the athlete’s own history, which is exactly how medical staff think about it.

ExampleAsymmetry against the pre-injury baseline, closing over weeks of rehabilitation — evidence for the return decision, not the decision itself. Illustrative rendering.

How it works

The machinery is shared with the injury-risk research program, pointed the other way: risk work watches for drift away from the baseline; return-to-play watches the drift come home. Rehabilitation sessions are embedded into the same signature space; per-signal distances — asymmetry, coordination, intensity tolerance — are tracked over weeks; and every report keeps links to the movement windows behind it, so medical staff can inspect the evidence under each trend.

What it would make possible

For medical and performance staff, the deliverable this program works toward is an evidence-linked progress report: where the athlete stands against their own baseline, per signal, with the underlying movement windows one click away. The same lens — one athlete, one camera, one baseline — is the rehabilitation angle of the personal solution.

ParameterValueNotes
Baselinepre-injury signature distributionThe athlete’s own documented movement — the definition of “back”.
Signalsasymmetry · coordination · intensity toleranceEach tracked as a distance to baseline, session by session.
Outputprogress reports + evidence windowsWeek-over-week trends, each linked to its source segments.
Boundarysupports the decisionReturn-to-play clearance stays with medical staff — never with a score.

Status & roadmap

Research

Research. This program composes validated pieces — signatures, personal baselines, drift measurement — into a rehabilitation workflow, and inherits their proof-of-concept scale. No recovery-tracking performance is claimed, and none will be until it survives evaluation with clinical partners against real rehabilitation outcomes.