{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"invariant_mode_decomposition_design__sport_science","archetype_slug":"invariant_mode_decomposition_design","domain_slug":"sport_science","title":"Shadow Evaluation of Hidden Coordination Instability in Return-to-Sport Testing","opportunity_summary":"Evaluate whether a phase-transition operator applied to repeated cutting and landing measurements reveals reproducible, weakly damped coordination modes that add decision-relevant information beyond ordinary return-to-sport thresholds and a direct multivariable risk model. The candidate is technically specified and safely bounded for shadow evaluation, but demand prevalence, incremental clinical value, causal modifiability, prior-art distinctiveness, and implementation economics remain unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"Treating sports-medicine clinicians are the prospective adopters and retain authority over clearance and rehabilitation; athlete participation requires informed consent, with rehabilitation staff and research partners supporting measurement and evaluation.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"If the proposed mode reliably identifies concealed loading or control instability among athletes who pass ordinary criteria, it could improve clearance evidence and rehabilitation targeting while avoiding unnecessary delay for dynamically stable athletes. Actual injury reduction and the prevalence of the stated problem are unsupported."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal addresses recognizable concerns for athletes, clinicians, rehabilitation staff, and teams, and it preserves clinical authority. The sealed candidate provides no evidence of adopter demand, workflow willingness, purchasing authority, or how often existing assessments miss the proposed pattern."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"The explicit incremental claim is that transition-derived modes provide repeatable reconstruction or prognostic information beyond ordinary thresholds and a direct multivariable model using the same measurements. That advantage is testable but presently hypothetical, and the nearest rival may equal or outperform it."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The combination of phase-transition operators, invariant-mode decomposition, stability interpretation, and outcome sensitivity is internally differentiated from the stated baseline and nearest rival. However, prior art is explicitly unsearched, and overlap with dynamic-stability, coordination-variability, system-identification, and return-to-sport methods is unverified."},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The candidate specifies instrumented trials, time-series inputs, operator fitting, decomposition, reconstruction, and residual, conditioning, spectral-gap, and drift checks. Feasibility is uncertain because local operators may be ill-conditioned or non-diagonalizable, modes may lack session repeatability, and nonlinear task dependence may invalidate the representation."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"A clear authority arrangement is supplied: clinicians retain clearance and training control, athletes consent and may decline, and the first study cannot alter clearance. Longer-term adoption still depends on validation, governance, and integration into clinical workflow."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":3,"rationale":"A preregistered two-session shadow study of approximately 30 athletes is bounded and can test identifiability, repeatability, held-out reconstruction, and preliminary incremental prognostic signal. It cannot establish injury causation, intervention effectiveness, recurrence reduction, or generalization across tasks and fatigue states."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate could add a safety check for coupled instability missed by marginal thresholds, while explicit exclusions, athlete-level stopping rules, model suspension criteria, and reversion to ordinary assessment limit first-stage risk. False reassurance, false-positive concern, privacy misuse, and load shifting remain material risks."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The analytic method could potentially be reused across athletes and sites with standardized instrumented tasks, but scalability depends on sensor availability, preprocessing consistency, task standardization, clinician interpretation, data governance, and demonstrated robustness to site and population drift."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Preregistered shadow-mode study of approximately 30 consenting athletes over two standardized sessions, including recruitment, clinician and research labor, instrumented movement and muscle-activation data collection, preprocessing, operator and rival-model analysis, data governance, and reporting.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["An appropriate clinical or sport-science site and core instrumentation are already available or can be accessed without major capital purchase.","The study remains observational and does not affect clearance or prescribe experimental rehabilitation.","The band includes labor, participant coordination, analysis, compliance, and evaluation but not a powered reinjury-outcome trial."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Preparation for limited clinical use after supporting evidence, including standardized acquisition and preprocessing, software hardening, clinician-facing interpretation, privacy and governance controls, validation in the target setting, training, integration, and monitoring thresholds.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Deployment is limited to one or a few partner sites with compatible motion, force, and muscle-activation measurement capabilities.","Regulatory and institutional requirements do not demand a substantially larger medical-device program.","Clearance remains clinician-controlled and the system initially provides decision support only."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Launch of a monitored multi-clinician or limited multi-site service, including site calibration, workflow integration, staff training, prospective quality assurance, drift surveillance, support, security, and post-launch evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch follows successful repeatability, incremental-value, and controlled-intervention evidence.","Participating sites can standardize cutting and landing protocols and obtain adequate time-series data.","This scope excludes broad national rollout and large purchases of new biomechanics laboratories."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Annual operation for a limited deployment, including analyst and clinical oversight, software maintenance, data storage and security, equipment calibration, model-quality monitoring, drift review, staff refreshers, and outcome audit.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing site personnel and major instrumentation are shared with other clinical or research activities.","Volume remains limited and no exact per-athlete economics are assumed.","Material model failure or expansion to many sites would require additional revalidation and resources."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate describes a recognizable clinical failure mode: athletes may pass strength, symmetry, pain, task-completion, and selected biomechanical thresholds while retaining reproducible coupled movement behavior relevant to loading or control. Its prevalence and outcome magnitude still require external evidence."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"Treating clinicians are explicitly identified as retaining clearance and training authority, athletes retain consent and refusal rights, and rehabilitation staff are identified as operational participants."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate claims that a reproducible weakly damped or growing transition-derived mode adds held-out reconstruction or prognostic information beyond ordinary criteria and a direct multivariable model using the same measurements."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The authorized first step is a preregistered, approximately 30-athlete, two-session shadow study that compares repeatability, held-out reconstruction, and prognostic signals without changing clearance."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"For the first evidence step, clinical authority, consent, excluded actions, symptom-based stopping, model suspension criteria, and rollback to ordinary assessment are explicit. These safeguards do not authorize later clearance use."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate identifies required measurements, personnel, monitoring, and governance activities, permitting broad resource bands, but supplies no site configuration, equipment inventory, integration requirements, participant throughput, regulatory pathway, or externally verified costs."}},"blocking_evidence":["No evidence establishes how often athletes who pass ordinary criteria exhibit a reproducible coupled instability associated with loading, loss of control, or reinjury beyond baseline covariates.","The operator's conditioning, diagonalizability, spectral separation, residual adequacy, session repeatability, and robustness to preprocessing, speed, fatigue, and task variation are unknown.","Incremental performance over ordinary thresholds and the stated direct multivariable rival has not been demonstrated in held-out athletes.","The shadow study cannot establish that a detected mode is causal, modifiable, or capable of reducing recurrence.","Mode-targeted rehabilitation has not been compared with matched standard rehabilitation for modal, loading, control, adverse, or recurrence outcomes.","Prior art and implemented-method overlap are unsearched and unverified.","Clinical workflow acceptability, athlete response, privacy governance, multi-site transportability, and implementation economics are unsupported."],"next_evidence_step":"Conduct the authorized preregistered shadow-mode study in approximately 30 consenting athletes across two standardized sessions, with no effect on clearance. Compare the proposed transition-mode method against ordinary return-to-sport criteria and a direct multivariable model using identical measurements on session repeatability, held-out reconstruction, residual structure, and prespecified loading or control signals. Falsify progression if modes are not repeatable, conditioning or spectral-gap thresholds fail, relevant behavior remains structured in residuals, or the method provides no incremental held-out signal.","research_questions":["Among athletes passing ordinary criteria, how frequently is a coupled dynamic pattern reproducible across representative sessions?","Does the proposed method improve held-out reconstruction or prespecified loading and control prediction over ordinary thresholds and the direct multivariable rival?","Are inferred modes robust to preprocessing choices, task speed, fatigue, perturbation, measurement noise, and session drift?","Do conditioning, diagonalizability, spectral-gap, and residual checks support a stable modal interpretation in enough athletes to be useful?","Which existing dynamic-stability, coordination, system-identification, or return-to-sport methods most closely match the proposal, and what contribution remains distinct?","In a later controlled study, does clinician-approved mode-targeted rehabilitation change the prespecified modal gain or amplitude relative to matched standard rehabilitation?","Do modal changes translate into improved loading, control, and ultimately recurrence outcomes without worsening another coupled mode or shifting load elsewhere?","What data-governance, clinician-interpretation, equipment, workflow, and monitoring requirements determine adoption feasibility and resource burden?"],"recommendation":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH","uncertainty_constraints":["This is a closed-book assessment with no external validation of prevalence, demand, prior art, market size, realized impact, or exact cost.","The proposal is a hypothesis and must not be interpreted as an established injury mechanism or diagnostic method.","Association, predictive increment, intervention responsiveness, and recurrence reduction are separate claims requiring separate evidence.","The approximately 30-athlete shadow study can assess feasibility and preliminary signal but may be inadequate for stable prognostic or reinjury estimates.","Local modal interpretations may not generalize across athletes, tasks, speeds, perturbations, fatigue states, rehabilitation stages, sensors, or sites.","All cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges based on stated scope assumptions, not externally verified prices.","No clearance, exclusion, treatment withholding, or experimental training decision is authorized by the initial study."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior art is unsearched and unverified in this closed-book assessment. No claim is made about novelty, prevalence, closest implemented methods, market availability, or comparative performance beyond the candidate's stated baseline and nearest rival."}