Historic events make a Major League Baseball (MLB) season memorable. In October 2017, for instance, the Houston Astros won its first World Series championship ever. Several months before that, however, a less-well-known event took place: MLB approved the use of any Whoop Inc. wearable fitness tracker by all players and coaches in games.
Worn like a watch, the tracker features a sensor that measures an athlete’s heart rate, heart-rate variability, ambient temperature, motion, movement and skin response. It captures this data more than 100 times per second and sends the information to an app on the athlete’s iPhone or Android. Either device, in turn, provides data on strain and recovery to help the athlete balance training, reduce injuries and predict performance.