StrideSAFE Shows Technology is Key for Equine Safety

As technology has grown rapidly in the past few decades, it has often found a slow, uphill battle to be adopted by horsemen. Other sports have embraced the use of technology to better analyze their potential success in competition as well as the health of their athletes.

The health of racehorses has been an issue at the forefront of the racing industry since the turn of the 21st century, if not longer. Yet, unlike other sports, racing has been slow to adopt technological analytic methods to prevent catastrophic injuries. Those days appear to be behind us.

“Our athletes are talking to us,” said Keeneland‘s vice president of equine safety Dr. Stuart Brown. “We just need to learn to listen with something different than our ears.”

That something different is the StrideSAFE sensor device. Initially created by Dr. David Lambert in 2005 to predict performance in horses he trained, the StrideSAFE device has been gathering analytical data to help make racing safer for both individual horses and the overall population.

“All that movement that’s coming from the horse is measurable,” Lambert said. “The accelerometer system was there to try and measure what the jockeys were feeling and to accumulate a database of elite movers.”

Lambert received help creating the device from a Seattle company doing sensor research and technology for NASA. With their help, Lambert was able to develop an accelerometer system small enough to put on a horse and decipher each horse’s unique “fingerprint.”

The legs can only go into certain places,” Lambert said. “How the horse is designed and put together determines how he moves.”

Lambert noticed that the device’s signal would go strange every so often, and upon further review of this data, determined it was due to an underlying unsoundness. Lambert realized the use of this device could be much more beneficial on a wider scale to detect injuries before they happen.

“There’s a quote from Galileo,” Lambert said. “He urged his students to measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not. That was pretty well what we did.”

The use of sensors on horses was not an entirely new concept. A professor Lambert knew at Washington State University was using sensors in the 1970s on horses’ shoes to study ground reactive forces.

In addition, a sensor system was developed in Melbourne, Australia, by a company called StrideMASTER for timing that had been used in every race in Tasmania for about a decade. The device was much more sophisticated than Lambert’s, and he met with StrideMASTER’s David Hawke to create a better device as the cluster of breakdowns began that plagued Santa Anita Park throughout 2019.

“I felt at that point we had something we could contribute to the solution,” Lambert said. “I’d seen evidence on my sensors that this would indeed identify horses in trouble.”

Imagine swinging at a golf ball; each swing follows a certain motion. Suddenly, pain starts to appear in your back so you start to adjust your swing in a way that minimizes the pain. Horses will also make slight adjustments to cover discomfort. Sometimes, these adjustments are so small that the rider or trainer cannot feel or see it. The StrideSAFE device picks it up.

“A sensor that would measure multiple planes of movement of a horse and then be able to detect changes in that pattern,” explained Brown. “It is wearable, the horse can carry on a routine basis that is factoring 2-3,000 readings a second as the horse moves across different surfaces and then is providing objective feedback. To me, it is revolutionary.”

By combining efforts with StrideMASTER, Lambert gained access to more than 35,000 files of data from horses running in races to better build the device’s algorithm, which has only continued to grow as technology develops further.

“In the last year, AI has come forward in leaps and bounds,” said Lambert. “We have now started to involve AI solutions. The complexity of AI and its ability to understand all the interrelationships of this signal that we can’t see—we’re on an exponential level of improvement.”

StrideSAFE has continued to build upon the database received from Tasmanian racing through work done at New York Racing Association tracks, Emerald Downs in Washington, and Rillito Park Race Track in Arizona.

Currently, StrideSAFE is focused on Kentucky as all five Thoroughbred tracks have committed to using the devices on a year-round basis. In Kentucky, every stride taken by a horse in a race since mid-August has been recorded by StrideSAFE. The device was also used in all races during the 2023-24 winter meet at Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots in Louisiana.

StrideSAFE downloads the horse’s file after a race and puts the report into their system. Next, the report will be dropped into each trainer’s accessible file. Trainers can request a deeper analysis if any of the reports give them concern. The racetracks have covered the costs.

The reports are done automatically once a horse crosses the finish line. Should a horse get pulled up and not finish a race, the StrideSAFE team will make a manual assessment of every stride that the horse took during the race. StrideSAFE general manager Greg Pachman, who has a background in aviation, compared this to the black box.

“We deliver that to the equine medical director,” Pachman said. “Instead of just saying ‘we had a horse break down yesterday,’ he’s got incredible amounts of detail about what happened stride by stride in that race.”

Lambert and his team, through their data, have determined an “optimum stride” while taking into account all the variations horses may have in conformation, weight, size, and more. The risk of injury increases as horses get further away from the optimum stride.

“We allow two standard deviations from the mean to soak up all of the differences based on the way they are structured,” Pachman said. “Once you get past that, it’s usually an indication that something is not optimal.

“There are outlier horses that will go past that and not be a bigger risk of injury, but through thousands of cases we have found that the further you get away from that optimum stride, the higher the probability that you’re going to suffer a catastrophic injury.”

The horse’s risk factor level is on the reports given to trainers and shows a comparison to the horse’s previous races over the last six months. Category one is the lowest risk while category five is the highest.

“(The risk is) about 300 times greater for a category five horse than it is for a category one horse,” Pachman said. “Eighty-five percent of the catastrophic injuries that we see happen to category five horses.”

Pachman calculated the odds of suffering a catastrophic injury, based on the United States injury rate, are around 800-1. A category five horse’s odds of catastrophic injury are between 35-1 and 50-1.

“Being able to use that and give direct feedback to the horsemen is really valuable,” said Brown. “It becomes a piece of the tool kit.”

The information is important to accumulate for the safety of each individual horse, but it also helps to understand the population as a whole.

“One of the things I thought was really important about Keeneland working with StrideSAFE was sharing the population of horses,” said Brown. “All the things you do in advocacy on behalf of the wellness of the horse, an understanding of that population becomes important.”

“We were on 11% of starters in America last year,” said Pachman. “(Kentucky) wants to continue to use us on a year-round basis so that we can get information and track horses throughout the year. We’re generating about 5,000 race files a month between Fair Grounds and Turfway Park.”

One of the benefits of having Fair Grounds included was seeing how horses that were tracked in Kentucky throughout the summer and fall reacted to a change in location, and how switching back to Kentucky this spring will impact them. One of the next steps for StrideSAFE will be bringing other states that funnel horses into Kentucky, like Indiana, Ohio, and Arkansas, on board.

“We’re very scalable at this point,” Lambert said. “We could very easily just do the whole country if they get behind us.”

Brown points out there are many different variables at play when it comes to what a horse will experience daily. Knowing these variables can lead to remodeling changes on a horse’s musculoskeletal system, being able to detect those impacts is highly valuable to the population. StrideSAFE is currently working on automating reports on track conditions that could give the racetracks daily feedback on the risk factors of their surface, something they are currently doing manually every week.

“They’re setting the track up a certain way, we’ve got 80 horses running over it later,” Pachman said. “If they’re going to make a change to it, we can give them instant feedback just a few hours later of how did that affect the track from a risk standpoint compared to the way it was yesterday.”

In addition, they are tying their information to race conditions. The database will show if there are increased risk factors due to age groups, distance, class levels, and more. Pachman hopes this data can be used by racing secretaries to write races that are lower risk.

Lambert is hopeful that the device he created will be a major turning point for equine safety.

“I think we can be optimistic now because, for the first time, we have an understanding of the track from the horse’s point of view,” Lambert said. “The remaining fractures are clearly in our sights.

“We can see about 85% of them coming. As things move forward and we get all these protocols put together properly, a very large number of the remaining fractures will be recognizable and hopefully diagnosable.”

Rillito Park experienced seven deaths from 63 races during the first four weeks of its 2022 racing season. Among changes Rillito made for their 2023 meeting were the addition of StrideSAFE sensors. During that 2023 season, the track reported zero breakdowns in more than 140 races.

“I found it quite fascinating how I would go around the barns after we had a day’s racing and talk to the regulator vets, the clinical vets, and the trainers,” Lambert said. “It gave them a level of awareness and interest that hadn’t been there before. The trainers became fascinated, the culture changed.”

“That’s why I’m optimistic about our effort, it’s all about the welfare of the horses. When we start to implement these things and the trainers engage, and they begin to see the benefits of this, there will indeed be a culture change on the backstretch that will further the degree of improvement in the problem.”

Brown says Keeneland is proud to be one of the tracks that is beginning to use this technology.

“(Keeneland) was a place that was built foundationally for the horse,” Brown said. “Whenever there is an opportunity to take a tool like this that shows the kind of promise, it makes the most sense for a place like Keeneland to apply that.”

Both Lambert and Pachman are grateful for all the help they have been given by the racetracks and state organizations that have made the use of the device possible and believe in the investment in technology.

“(The sport) pulled back as far as we can on the drugs, on other things,” Pachman said. “We dropped the injury rate 37% from 2019, but now it’s going to get more difficult to get that extra 0.1%. If we’re going to continue to make improvements it has to be in the area of technology.”

Lambert added that technology could have immediate payoffs. “The data would tell us the potential for a 50% improvement is right in front of us.”