New $3m European-Israeli collaboration to build brain training system and enhance football (soccer) players’ game intelligence

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The ini­tial pilot, fund­ed under the EU Hori­zon 2020 frame­work and to be com­plet­ed by 2017, will start with lead­ing Euro­pean soc­cer acad­e­mies includ­ing Ajax Ams­ter­dam, PSV Eind­hoven, AZ Alk­maar and FC Freiburg, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Sports Uni­ver­si­ty in Cologne, Germany.

Accord­ing to the for­mal descrip­tion to the project Brain Per­for­mance Enhance­ment Rev­o­lu­tion — Advanced Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Sys­tem for Foot­ball Play­ers, which fea­tures an EU con­tri­bu­tion of over 1.8 mil­lion euros, its objec­tives are as follows:

“The Brain­PEER project aims at pre­sent­ing a high­ly effec­tive brain-train­ing sys­tem for foot­ball play­ers. It will do so by adopt­ing ACE’s (note: Applied Cog­ni­tive Engi­neer­ing, based in Israel, is the Project Coor­di­na­tor) patent­ed Cog­ni­tive Sim­u­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy to foot­ball, demon­strat­ing it with elite foot­ball acad­e­mies, then run field tri­als with indi­vid­ual youth players.

Foot­ball is the world’s most pop­u­lar sport…According to foot­ball experts, the main dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing skill between good foot­ball play­ers and aver­age ones is game intel­li­gence. Alas, there are cur­rent­ly no effec­tive tools to improve this crit­i­cal aptitude.

ACE pro­pos­es an inno­v­a­tive and high­ly effec­tive cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram, address­ing foot­ball-relat­ed cog­ni­tive skills such as spa­tial aware­ness, antic­i­pa­tion, and deci­sion making.

The out­come of the project will be a mar­ket-ready brain-train­ing prod­uct for foot­ball play­ers of all ages and skill lev­els – the Foot­ball Intel­li­Gym. The pro­gram is designed as a friend­ly video-game, will be com­pat­i­ble with mobile devices, and at an afford­able price…This will pave the way to pre­sent­ing effec­tive brain train­ers for oth­er com­plex and cog­ni­tive-chal­leng­ing pro­fes­sions such as first-respon­ders, med­ical staff, oper­a­tors of con­trol cen­tres (e.g. air­port con­trollers and smart city offi­cers), and drivers.”

–> Dur­ing the upcom­ing Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit (Novem­ber 17–19th) we will have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss this project with some of the key peo­ple involved.

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