The EIS Triumphs At Sport Industry Awards 2022
The English Institute of Sport (EIS) has been named the winner of the Cutting Edge Award at the prestigious Sport Industry Awards 2022, for its work on an innovative technology that provides real-time female hormone data to improve training and performance.
The winning project, Hormonix, was developed in partnership with Mint Diagnostics to increase the capability of analysing female hormones in high frequency in a non-invasive way, using saliva rather than through needles or blood. The data is returned in a time efficient manner, to allow the athlete and their support staff to act on the results.
As well as being trialled by a number of elite athletes from eight different sports, Hormonix was also successfully rolled out at Manchester City Women last season, providing detailed insight into players’ menstrual cycles.
The Sport Industry Awards celebrate the immense work done around the sector, whether it’s delivering world-leading events of all formats and scale, or using sport as a platform to drive social change, to those campaigns that have an ingenious creative spark and reverberate throughout the sports industry and beyond.
Co-Lead of Female Health and Performance at the EIS, Dr Richard Burden, and Senior Sports Physician (Athlete Health), Anita Biswas, said: “We are absolutely thrilled that Hormonix has been recognised on a stage as big as the Sport Industry Awards. Alongside Mint Diagnostics, we have been working on Hormonix for a number of years and know that it has the potential to change how female athletes train for the better.
“There is currently nowhere near enough specific research or support available to elite female athletes and that is something we are trying to address through our SmartHERcampaign at the EIS.”
Co-Founder and CTO of Mint Diagnostics, Richard White, added: “We’ve had a really close collaboration with the English Institute of Sport for five years now, and it’s fantastic that the joint hard work that has resulted in Hormonix has been recognised with such a prestigious award. A great result for all of us involved in the project!”
The other nominees in the Cutting Edge category were the ECB, Extreme E, the IRONMAN Group, Vodafone and WSC Sports.
The EIS was also nominated for Sport Organisation of the Year at the ceremony, which took place at Evolution London on Thursday 12 May, alongside the EFL, the European Tour Group, Extreme E, Loughborough University and eventual winners Brentford FC.
The EIS was in the running for two more awards at the Sports Technology Awards 2022, which were held on the same evening (12 May) at The Londoner on London’s Leicester Square, and which are recognised as the leading, international mark of excellence in tech-led innovation in sport.
The EIS was nominated in two categories – Best Technology for Injury Prevention or Rehabilitation, and Equipment or Wearable of the Year – for its work in developing muscle-warming technology to support athletes competing on the world stage.
Heated garments are not new in elite sport, but the EIS maximised advances in heater technology and masterminded a novel solution in collaboration with industry experts, using printed functionalised graphene ink and incorporating pioneering electronic circuitry to produce temperature-regulated panels.
The project was run by the EIS Performance Innovation Team, in close partnership with the Applied Sports, Technology, Exercise and Medicine (A-STEM) Research Centre, the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating (WCPC) at Swansea University, Haydale, Newbury Electronics, Crucible Design and Sew Systems.
Ultimately the Injury Prevention or Rehabilitation award went to Danu Sports, and the Equipment or Wearable award to Motion Metrics, in what were two high-quality fields of competition.
This year (2022) marks 20 years since the inception of the English Institute of Sport in 2002. We have been on an incredible journey since then, growing cycle by cycle to become a world-leading organisation that now employs nearly 400 people. We have contributed to more than 1,000 British Olympic and Paralympic medals in that time, and we continue in our mission of delivering outstanding support that enables sports and athletes to excel.