The Podium Institute for Sports Medicine and Technology is the world’s first independent academic institute focused on the safety and lifelong health of youth and grassroots as well as professional athletes. Its purpose is to inspire and forge evidence-based changes in sport and physical education, and to develop innovative and scalable technologies to monitor, analyse and ultimately prevent sport injury across the 22 million adults and 3 million children who participate in sport annually across the UK, as well as the hundreds of millions who partake in amateur and professional sport internationally.
The Institute combines Oxford’s longstanding tradition in sports and education with the very best of cross-disciplinary scientific, medical, and technological research. It forms part of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering – which has a 15-year track-record of combining medicine and technology to achieve adoption and healthcare impact – and draws on world-leading expertise across the medical and technological sciences, including clinical neurosciences, orthopedics, population health and machine learning. The Podium Institute represents an ambitious long-term partnership between the University of Oxford and the NGO and registered charity Podium Analytics, and the coming together of leaders across sport, science, academia, technology, and business to spearhead a new approach to the issue of sports-related injury for athletes of all ages.
The initial work of the Institute is focused on traumatic injuries such as concussion, serious musculoskeletal injuries as well as sudden cardiac death and the psychological factors that lead to injury. Our aim is the practical adoption, within 5 years, of impactful evidence-based changes for sport safety, not just for male elite adult athletes but for sports participants of all genders and ages across professional, grassroots, community and school sports.
