MCP Sport: Chilean Sportech develops technology to improve athletes' performance
In addition, MCP Sport, the sportech from the Valparaiso region, is joining the Global Sport Innovation Center - GSIC (by Microsoft), which is headquartered in Madrid and brings together various players in the European sports industry.
The sports industry is going through a stage of accelerated changes, driven by technology and the pursuit of ever higher performances. In this context, a Chilean startup, MCP Sports, aims to help athletes improve their performance and exceed their goals, based on optimizing their cognitive performance.
This marks a significant difference in comparison to other proposals mainly focused on physical training. In the case of this sportech born in the Valparaiso Region, its proposal includes contextualized training hand in hand with a cognitive-motor evaluation, whose platform is named NeuroSwift.
"What we do is measure and train the speed at which an athlete perceives and reacts to real game stimuli, which is their cognitive-motor performance, something that is often overlooked in traditional plans focused on endurance or strength", explains Fabi谩n Moya-Vergara, co-founder of MCP Sports and Master of Science in Physical Activity and Sports.
Follow us on: 
This is because MCP technology integrates cloud analysis software, operated through a system composed of a notebook, webcam, and Smart TV, along with a marked surface for the execution of specific exercises.
In this way, the platform allows for simulating competitive situations and evaluating metrics such as reaction time, displacement speed, and success and error rates, providing automated reports for making decisions in training and evaluations.
Neuroswift requires athletes to interpret real game scenarios, considering the positions of opponents and the ball before executing a motor response. With an international patent valid for Chile and Spain, the tool is already an innovation with international reach, focused on improving the efficiency of athletes, reducing the likelihood of injuries, and strengthening the collective performance of teams.
The Benefits and Strengths
The strength of this solution lies in its multidisciplinary approach. By bringing together experts in high-performance sports, computer science, technology transfer, and robotics. In this context, MCP Sports addresses one of the industry's biggest challenges: the lack of comprehensive tools that combine the objective measurement of physical parameters with the in-depth analysis of athletes' decision-making.
This is because "today it is not enough to run fast or lift heavy weights: the winning athlete is the one who knows how to anticipate, adapt and solve with precision," details Moya, co-founder of the startup.
In this process, this science and technology-based company already has milestones that support its hypothesis and technological development. It has already executed a pilot in a Chilean professional football club, in addition to working with Fernanda Aguirre, a Chilean taekwondo player who managed to qualify for the Tokyo 2021 and Paris 2024 Olympic Games, hand in hand with the technological-cognitive preparation of MCP Sports.
In this regard, the national athlete maintains that the incorporation of a robust cognitive drive not only helped her improve reaction speed, thus reducing her gap with other participants from the continent, but also allowed her to boost her confidence and achieve competitive performance goals.
Growth as a business: the international market
To reach this point, MCP worked on its technology transfer process hand in hand with two higher education institutions; with the Research Laboratory in Physical Activity and Sport of the University of Playa Ancha (UPLA), in collaboration with the Technology Transfer and Licensing Office of the Federico Santa Mar铆a Technical University (UTFSM), to be able to build the technological tool.
Then, the next step is to seek the scaling of the startup, so they have just closed a Joint Venture with the Chilean Artificial Intelligence firm, WildSense Technologies, focusing on accelerating the technical and technological exploitation of the technology they are working on.
In addition, the company is currently executing the project "MCA Integrated System based on artificial vision to assess and train the cognitive-motor speed of athletes", part of the StartUp Ciencia program, funded by the National Research and Development Agency (ANID). They won the first innovation contest from the Club Deportivo Universidad Cat贸lica, along with having joined the Global Sport Innovation Center - GSIC (by Microsoft), which is headquartered in Madrid and brings together different players in the European sports industry.
In which disciplines could it be used?
MCP Sports' expectations are not limited to football, the king sport in Chile and one that moves millions of dollars globally. The team envisages opportunities in all collective sports, such as basketball, volleyball, hockey, rugby, and soccer; in addition to other individual disciplines such as taekwondo, tennis, and boxing, among others.
This is because the technology and methodology developed can be applied to any sport with a high component of uncertainty, reaction, and anticipation, which could benefit from this Chilean innovation.
In this regard, the dream of the startup founders is to be able to establish agreements with federations and multidisciplinary clubs, to provide a larger amount of data, support the science behind performance and, of course, consolidate a competitive product internationally, something they hope to start developing from the third quarter of this year.
Present and Future
By 2025, the focus has shifted to the technical and commercial adjustments of technology, particularly in optimizing the vision algorithm that the software possesses, hand in hand with cutting-edge techniques for people modeling through articulated models.
All of this will favor the attainment of more accurate metrics and reduce the times for cognitive-motor performance analysis. Meanwhile, in the commercial realm, the company will manage various collaboration and usage licensing agreements, where they have already formed a partnership with Wildsense; a Chilean company specializing in R&D in technologies related to IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Robotics.
The promise of MCP Sports, backed by science and the growing demand for technological solutions in sports, encourages close attention to this national endeavor that seeks to catapult the Chilean sports industry towards a new frontier, where the differentiating factor is mental speed and tactical precision, as relevant as physical strength and endurance.