AWS re:Invent 2025 - Peak Performance: IoT Innovation in Professional Sports (SPF301)

Source: Dev.to

Overview

AWS re:Invent 2025 – Peak Performance: IoT Innovation in Professional Sports (SPF301)

Mike and Greg from AWS discuss how Catapult Sports leverages AWS IoT services to transform athlete performance monitoring with the Vector 8 wearable. The session covers:

• Data ingestion architecture (hot data 10 Hz live tracking, cold data 100 Hz post‑game analysis) using AWS IoT Core, Amazon MSK, and Amazon S3.
• Key metrics such as player load and sport‑specific movements, illustrating how 36 million data points from a single NHL game enable AI‑driven insights.
• Device architecture built on AWS IoT Greengrass, showing OTA updates that are 32× faster than the previous Vector 7, onboarding reduced from days to 10 minutes, and the use of Shadows, Secure Tunneling, and Log Manager for remote configuration and diagnostics.
• Future directions: edge‑ML inference and real‑time cloud streaming for remote coaching.

Introduction: Data‑Driven Sports and Catapult Sports

Hands up if you knew that almost every professional or semi‑professional football team, as well as individual athletes, use some form of wearable device to track data in‑game or in practice.

The goal of today’s session is to show who makes these devices, the market they serve, and how the data they collect is turned into actionable insights.

Speakers

• Mike – Sports Solution Architect (Australia)
• Greg – Senior IoT Specialist Solution Architect

They will walk through Catapult Sports’ background, their technology stack, and the impact on athlete performance.

Agenda

1. Athlete data ingestion – what data is collected and how it’s streamed.
2. Device software architecture – how AWS services power the wearable.
3. Device onboarding & OTA updates – reducing rollout time from days to minutes.
4. Future roadmap – edge‑ML, real‑time streaming, and remote coaching.

Catapult Sports Overview

Catapult exists to “unleash the potential of every athlete and team in the world.” Operating at the intersection of sports science and analytics, its products aim to:

• Optimize performance
• Improve recoverability
• Quantify return‑to‑play

Catapult is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, employs over 400 people across 24 global locations.

Catapult’s Athlete Monitoring Solutions & the Vector 8 System

Within that video, I'm going to refer to a couple of things that you might have seen.
Catapult has a number of different solutions, and we don't have time to cover all of them,
but I'll touch on three and we'll go into depth into one of them specifically today.

First, we have athlete monitoring. You may have seen in the video there was a little device
that was put into a vest that one of the players was wearing. This is designed to
optimize performance, reduce the risk of injury, and improve recovery.

The Vector 8 platform integrates:

• AWS IoT Core for secure, bidirectional device communication.
• Amazon MSK (Kafka) for high‑throughput ingestion of hot data (10 Hz).
• Amazon S3 for durable storage of cold data (100 Hz) used in post‑game analysis.
• AWS IoT Greengrass to run edge workloads, enabling local ML inference and reducing latency.
• Device Shadows for state synchronization, Secure Tunneling for remote diagnostics, and Log Manager for centralized log collection.

These services together allow Catapult to deliver real‑time analytics, AI‑driven insights, and rapid OTA firmware updates that are dramatically faster than previous generations.