Plantiga 2.44
A quick shoutout and a big launch!
01. SBJ’s Best in Athlete Performance Tech
Last week in New York, Plantiga won Best in Athlete Performance Tech at the Sports Business Awards, nominated alongside Catapult, Whoop, and some of the biggest names in sports tech.
It honestly means a lot. We were very surprised and deeply grateful, and we feel like we're just getting started.
02. Introducing Norman Summaries
Now, to the reason for this email.
This is one that we are especially excited about.
Norman Summaries is live today. It's the first step in Norman's shift from a pure analytics engine into something closer to an applied sports science team dedicated to interpreting your data.
A quick refresher on Norman
Norman is our movement AI. Norman learns how an athlete moves and builds a personal movement signature with typical ranges across walks, runs, and jumps. From there, Norman auto-detects activities in every new session, classifies the data, and flags anything sitting outside that personal range.
What's new
Norman now writes summaries.
With your added context on how the athlete is feeling, historical injuries, and anything else relevant, Norman turns complex biomechanics into plain English, framed against our healthy population dataset.
You can run a summary on a full session, or zoom in and run one on any sub-activity - a walk test, a quarter of a basketball game, a set of sprints, etc.
Context is everything here. The more you give Norman, the sharper the summary. And in the coming weeks we'll be rolling in our Elite Benchmarks across a variety of sports, so if you're working with an elite college basketball player, for example, Norman will frame the summary against elite basketball norms. Same for hockey, or professional women’s basketball, and so on. Personal signature with sport-specific elite context, in plain English.
Complex movement data now becomes something a practitioner, athlete, coach, or patient can more easily act on.
03. Where we’re going
Summaries are step one. Here's the roadmap for what’s coming next:
Chat with Norman. Select a session and start a conversation. Ask questions, pull out specific features, request summaries of different segments.
Wider context window. Right now, Norman looks at the current session and the previous three. We'll be extending that out across a larger number of previous sessions, and very soon across the athlete's entire history.
Five personas. Norman will put on a different hat depending on what you're asking:
Technical Assistant
Biomechanics Expert
Return-to-Play Specialist
Performance Coach
Sport Scientist
Quick note: we’re building these five personas as distinct Agents, each with unique tools and expertise. The Technical Assistant will be the first to land, followed by the Biomechanics Expert and the Return-to-Play Specialist, with the rest rolling out in parallel over the coming months.
Norman is not here to replace any of these roles. If you’re a sport scientist, a return-to-play specialist, a performance coach, Norman is built to assist you as a force multiplier. Norman excels at summarizing vast amounts of tedious biometric data with added context, distilling important actionable information for you, as the expert, to act on.
The vision is a single movement intelligence AI that amplifies you, acting as an addition to your health and performance department.
One thing to note:
Norman is an AI in its infancy. It will get things wrong, sometimes confidently. Please double check the work, cross-reference it against your own eye on the data, and treat the summaries as a starting point, rather than the final word. This part really matters.
What would help us a lot: inside the app you'll see thumbs up and thumbs down on every summary. Please use them. That feedback is what trains the next version, and it's the fastest way to shape where Norman goes from here.
Please reach out directly with any comments, questions, or things you'd like to see. Reply to this email any time.
04. A bit on the name
Norman McKay was one of the co-founders of Plantiga. He was also my dad.
He passed away after a battle with prostate cancer right as the company was started, but his name is on all of our patents and he was critical in setting the direction we're still building toward today.
In fact, the AI we're building now is the one he and I were brainstorming years ago, so it feels fitting that Norman is named after him. And as his son, this one means a lot.