Abstract
Background: To gain a competitive advantage in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 American college football, teams often use a coded, hand/body gesture-based play-calling system to communicate calls to student-athletes on the field. Objective: The purpose of this study is to apply cognitive engineering concepts toward the improvement of signal transmission such that a realistic amount of data signaled will be received and understood by the student-athlete. Methods: Partnering with an NCAA coaching staff, information transmitted via signal-based communication pathways were quantified to inform the design of their signal system. Quality control coaches, practitioners of football signalling characterization and design, used an autoethnographic frame to train researchers on the communication protocol standards. A comprehensive literature review of sources from 1900 to 2019 was conducted to examine information transmission, signal-gesture taxonomies, sign-language recognition, and code design. Findings were applied to the signal system to quantify the information contained in the transmission between the signalling coaches and the student-athletes. Results: Results found that the observed signal system transmits an average of 12.62 bits of information on offense and 12.92 bits on defense with 23% and 12% redundancy, respectively. Conclusion: Recommendations were provided to the coaching staff regarding code optimization and gesture design to improve student-athlete performance.
Highlights
Hartley introduced information measurement in 1928 as it relates to electrical communication and points out the fundamental idea that the capacity to transmit information implies a quantitative measure of information (Hartley, 1928)
The review is supported by inputs and feedback from subject matter experts (SMEs)— professional coaching staff familiar with all communication methods used within the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 American football
To investigate the average number of information bits comprised in these signals and communicated during these play call transmissions, this research team partnered with an NCAA coaching staff to understand the standard no-huddle, play calling procedure of the sport
Summary
Hartley introduced information measurement in 1928 as it relates to electrical communication (i.e., physical rather than psychological considerations) and points out the fundamental idea that the (abstract) capacity to transmit information implies a (concrete) quantitative measure of information (Hartley, 1928). Shannon and Weaver expanded on these ideas in The Mathematical Theory of Communication and define information as, “the reduction of uncertainty,” which summarizes an abstract concept through mathematical deduction (Shannon, 1948) This difference in uncertainty from the state prior to an event and the state after an event is the quantity of information transmitted. To quantify the number of bits transmitted by a stimulus, event, or message, there are three statistical and qualitative variables that must be known about the information source: the number of total possible events, the probability of each event, and the context or sequence in which each event occurs These shall each be examined in this assessment. Conclusion: Recommendations were provided to the coaching staff regarding code optimization and gesture design to improve student-athlete performance
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