Wearable device targets overuse injuries in sports

By Robert C. Jones Jr. [email protected] 04-22-2026

Had fate dealt Adam Booker a different hand, he might have been hurling fastballs from a pitcher's mound instead of snapping spirals to a punter on the Miami Hurricanes football team.

An elbow injury Booker suffered as a high school pitcher derailed what was a promising baseball career. But he turned injury into opportunity, concentrating on football and mastering the art of long snapping to such a high degree that he's now recognized as one of the nation's top collegiate players at his specialty.

He is also using the hard lessons he learned from that injury to aid other athletes. Booker is part of a team of University of Miami College of Engineering students who have developed a high-tech wearable device that will help athletes avoid overuse injuries that result from repetitive movements such as throwing a baseball, swinging a tennis racquet-and snapping a football.

Video: Franco LaTona/University of Miami

"Biomechanics is the future of sports," said Booker, who graduates this spring with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. "If athletes can be taught how to perform a motion perfectly and to know when they've reached a point during practice that they need to pull back on reps, they're going to be the best version of themselves they can be."

The wearable he and his team have created will help see to that. The current version of the device is worn on the wrist, where its sensors track and record the number, speed, and acceleration rates of arm movements an athlete performs, transmitting that data over Bluetooth to an app on the user's smartphone.

A user interface will allow athletes to provide feedback on how they feel after each practice, and the device, which is slightly larger than an Apple Watch, will produce an AI-generated workout log with recommendations on the number of repetitions that should be performed, according to Emilio Reyes, one of the four mechanical engineering students working on the project. The device will be featured at the college's Senior Design Expo April 28.

Booker has tested the prototype of the device during long-snapping drills in practice. He and his team plan to further test the device in the College of Engineering's Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Lab to validate data garnered from early experiments.

"We're calling it Snap Sense for now. But our goal is to develop other versions of the device for athletes in many other sports where repetitive motions are often performed," said Booker, noting that pitchers, tennis players, golfers, and runners can also benefit from using the device.

Laureline Costa, a senior mechanical engineering major who is part of the Snap Sense team, is aware of that fact as well as anyone. Sixteen years of playing high school and club soccer, and enduring the high-impact running, pivoting, and sudden deceleration movements that go along with the sport, took a toll on her knees.

"I was playing an excessive amount of soccer and ended up fracturing my kneecaps," said Costa, who oversees the development of the Snap Sense app and now plays soccer recreationally. "So, working on this project hits home for me. Anything I can do to help other athletes avoid overuse injuries gives me a world of satisfaction."

While Reyes never participated in competitive sports, he has enjoyed working on the Snap Sense project because "it's given me the opportunity to use my electrical engineering skills," he said. "Now, I've really become immersed in sports engineering and can see myself carving out a career in the discipline."

A former collegiate golfer who also struggled with overuse injuries, Emily Zhu, who serves as the project manager, has enjoyed working on Snap Sense because "it's allowed me to stay connected in the sports industry even though I'm no longer competing," she said. "Through this project, I've found a way to combine my two loves: sports and engineering."

Though Booker graduates this spring, he'll still be on campus next academic year to fine-tune and perfect the Snap Sense device. He has one year of NCAA eligibility left and will compete for the Miami Hurricanes football team again while entering the college's fledgling sports engineering program as a graduate student.

"This project represents what I'd like to do in the workforce one day," he said. "If the NFL doesn't work out, I've got the best backup plan in the world."