August 31, 2016 USA Diving Tracks Health and Performance Data with Crowdsourced iPad App

From weekend warriors to professional athletes, competitors in every sport today rely on technology to track their health and performance. Apps, wearables, and monitoring devices are just a few of the tools athletes use to capture data and find a competitive edge.

Here at Topcoder, we’re extremely excited that an app built by the Topcoder iOS Community is being used by some of the world’s top athletes who recently converged on Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics. As part of our Swiftoberfest program last year, we partnered with USA Diving—the national governing body for Olympic diving in the United States—to develop an iPad app that tracks health and training data for Olympic divers.

Many Pools, One Application

Like many Olympic teams in the United States, USA Diving’s athletes and coaches are located throughout the country. This decentralized structure made it difficult to consistently track each athlete’s training volume, performance, and health. Coaches recorded different metrics with different tools, and data wasn’t aggregated for the team at USA Diving headquarters to analyze.

Although training data was tracked inconsistently, most coaches used iPads to capture video of their divers in action, and the idea of an easy-to-use iPad app offered the perfect solution. But with no experience bringing an app idea to life, the challenge for USA Diving was finding the right talent to design and build an app to their exact needs.

Crowdsourced App Design and Development

USA Diving partnered with Topcoder to tap into the collective expertise of our iOS Community—more than 20,000 iOS designers and developers around the world experienced at turning great ideas into beautiful iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch apps.

iOS Community members competed in 11 crowdsourcing challenges to design the user interface for the USA Diving app, build a clickable prototype, and develop production-ready code. Community members also incorporated feedback from coaches and athletes along the way to ensure the completed app was functional yet easy to use.

Meet the USA Diving App

The USA Diving app records each diver’s health and mood at every training session, which helps medical staff monitor injuries and recovery time, and dives are entered with just a few taps—perfect for wet fingers. Videos of dives are captured using the iPad camera or uploaded from external devices.

An intuitive dashboard helps coaches and athletes monitor the number and type of training dives performed as well dive scores. Data and videos from previous training sessions are also accessible through the app, so it’s easy to review past performance and look for opportunities to improve.

And best of all, coaches and staff at USA Diving headquarters now have visibility across the entire Olympic diving team. All data can be exported for analysis of health information and dive counts and scores, and USA Diving can better ensure consistency of training from one pool to the next.