Invisible Monitoring for Athlete Health and Performance: A Call for a Better Conceptualization and Practical Recommendations

BACKGROUND: Practices to routinely monitor athletes are rapidly changing. With the concurrent exponential rise in wearable technologies and advanced data analysis, tracking training exposures and responses is widespread and more frequent in the athlete-coach decision-making process. Within this scenario, the concept of invisible monitoring emerged, which was initially vaguely defined as testing athletes without testing them. Despite sound practical applications and benefits (eg, reduced burden on player staff and more frequent measurement), a clear lack of constitutive definition has led to multiple cleavages in both research and practice, including ethical concerns.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to (1) extend the current conceptualization of invisible monitoring by considering subdimensions of the concept and (2) its data-related and ethical challenges and (3) provide practical considerations to implement invisible monitoring. Monitoring burden (degree of obtrusion and frequency of measurement) and the number of constructs a single measurement tool can assess have been proposed as subdimensions of the concept of invisible monitoring. Challenges include the governance and analysis of data required to make estimates, validity and reliability of an invisible monitoring measure, and communication to athletes.

CONCLUSIONS: This commentary presents a first attempt to conceptualize invisible monitoring in the context of elite sport and provide subdimensions of the concept that can be used to classify choices of measurement tools. A consensus is required from both researchers and practitioners regarding its definition and operationalization to optimize current monitoring services to elite athletes.