Kognia

Overview

Kognia Sports Intelligence is a Barcelona-based startup building a next-generation soccer analytics platform. Kognia’s technology automatizes and conducts real-time and post-match tactical analysis of football games Kognia’s software provides feedback directly to coaching staff in their own language. Coaches are alerted to important tactical situations and given suggestions for exploiting them. Post-match, users can review squad performance and explore a database of training drills based on the detected tactics. Current methods of data analysis have limited practical application for coaches (e.g., surface-level statistics such as heat maps and distance traveled), and despite technology, a coaching staff must still spend many hours doing manual video analysis in order to identify tactical patterns. Kognia’s approach differs from current alternatives because it detects specific, high-level tactical fundamentals that have our team of football experts led by Joan Vilà, former FC Barcelona Director of Methodology and mentor to numerous elite players and coaches such as Xavi Hernández and Carles Puyol. The vision of Kognia goes beyond serving technical staff in Football Clubs. Based on the interpretation of what happens in the field of play, the objective is to offer information 360 degrees, that is, to multiple industry segments and users, including scouting professionals, health condition practitioners, media companies or the Sport segment.

Situation

Kognia Sports Intelligence asked us to develop a whole new part of its platform that consisted of a manual video annotation feature, to allow sport analysts to tag events in a match, from a live video stream or from a video file. In order to do so, we proposed to develop the new feature with a set of React components to be consumed from and integrated into their main Dashboard webapp, allowing not only the goal of the project to be achieved, but also easing the reuse of these components elsewhere in Kogniasports platform. Those components were of a different nature, from simple master & detail lists and forms, video players and uploaders to a component capable of listening to keyboard events in order to track hotkeys for tagging events during football matches.

Goals

Develop a full functional manual event annotation tools for sports video. Design an SDK-like, component based frontend architecture Integrate the new feature in the existing platform, adapting to the flows and systems in place

technologies used

React, Typescript, TailwindCSS, Rollup, ESBuild, Typedoc, Vercel.

Results

The project was developed, tested and delivered before the agreed deadline.
We used the outstanding weeks to further develop extra features.
The application and the feature we developed is now deployed and working in production.

Challenges

Design an SDK like frontend architecture - When gathering requirements, we based our approach on the fact that the feature to be developed was important enough to be treated as an independent project, so we would have freedom to set up our work as we liked. However, the existing code from Kognia and the authentication and user management flows made this approach not feasible, and we had to adapt our view of the project to provide the best result to our customer. We then changed our mindset and did our best to make our work available to the full Kognia platform, not only our part - and decided to follow an SDK like approach, providing access not only to the views we had to develop, but to all its components to use them in other existing parts of the platform.

What we did

A completely isolated environment living inside their monorepo project approach that made us self sufficient avoiding completely interference with their daily work.
We bundled all the components inside an SDK, 100% typed using Typescript and modern React, with quality documentation (Typedoc) and helped them in the integration in their main webapp.
We used modern tools like Vercel in order to let them check the progress of our work, almost in real-time.