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Technology at the Service of Sports: How Science Helps Protect Athletes’ Hearts
Ensuring that high-performance athletes train safely and effectively has become increasingly important. To achieve this, specialists require tools capable of accurately assessing how the cardiovascular and respiratory systems respond during exercise, as traditional methods do not always reflect the specific demands of each sport.
Until recently, stress tests and cardiovascular monitoring systems were available, but many of them evaluated athletes under conditions that failed to replicate the specific movements involved in sports such as boxing, judo, taekwondo, and fencing. This limitation reduced the ability to tailor training programs to the actual needs of each athlete.
To address this challenge, Cuban researchers conducted a study involving 490 elite athletes between 2018 and 2023. The research team developed assessment protocols adapted to the specific movement patterns of different sports and incorporated digital technologies to monitor cardiovascular and respiratory activity in real time. In addition, they created a software tool that facilitates the calculation of training zones based on the results obtained.
The findings demonstrated that these innovations enable much more precise monitoring of athletes’ physical condition and support medical and sports-related decision-making. With this information, it becomes possible to better individualize training loads, optimize athletic performance, and contribute to the prevention of health issues associated with physical exertion.
This work represents an important step forward in the modernization of sports medicine in Cuba and highlights how digital transformation can benefit healthcare professionals, coaches, and athletes alike. As a next step, the researchers propose expanding the use of these technologies to additional sports disciplines and incorporating them into standard biomedical assessment and monitoring protocols.
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