The Melbourne
Bionics Company

ARES Precision matters.

See what the cameras can’t.

Cameras see the movement. Ares reads the muscle underneath it, while the game runs — and Athena scores it for the people who make the call.

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Four movements, and what the knee does in each

Start with walking. Then try cutting.

Left leg Right leg Muscle working

ACL risk index

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—Knee falling inward, peak

—How far the knee bends

—Hamstring against quad

—Left–right imbalance

Pick a movement to begin.

The limb reconstruction and the activation model are the ones running on our hardware today. The movements and the muscle traces are modelled for this demonstration, not recorded from an athlete, and the index is illustrative — see where it stands.

How an ACL usually goes

Nobody touches them

Most of these injuries happen with no contact at all. The ligament goes during a plant or a cut the player has made ten thousand times before.

It is over in a blink

The whole thing takes less time than it takes to react to it, which is why neither the athlete nor anyone on the sideline can do much in the moment.

The cost is a season

A scan, a surgeon and most of a year out, and for some players the leg never quite returns to what it was.

The mechanics that lead up to it are present much earlier, but not in anything the eye can pick out.

Why motion alone is not enough

Two players can hit exactly the same knee angle and be at very different risk, because one of them has the hamstrings holding the joint together and the other does not. From the boundary the two look identical.

What the leg did

How far the knee falls inward, how far it bends, and how hard the landing was.

Whether anything held it

Whether the hamstrings came on hard enough, and early enough, to take the load off the ligament. Nothing on the sideline can see that, and neither can a camera.

The garment

It is compression gear of the kind athletes already train in, with the sensing built into the fabric rather than strapped on top of it.

The Ares compression sleeve, showing the medial zip, the moulded electrode patches and the hooded pocket that carries the electronics module

The Ares electronics module, a slim sealed unit carrying the battery and critical electronics

Made for one player

Each sleeve is built from a scan of that athlete and fitted in person, so it sits in the same place every week and the readings stay comparable.

Nothing shifts mid-game

The compression holds the sensors where they need to be through contact and through a full session, which is most of the battle with wearable sensing.

Out of the way

A sealed unit sits behind the calf. Boots stay on, the warm-up does not change, and under a sock nobody can tell it is there.

An AFL player running with the ball, wearing Ares sleeves on both legs during a match

What the staff see

One screen. Every athlete in the session, with the ones worth a look sitting at the top of it.

The whole squad at a glance

Everyone in the session on one screen, from a player having a normal week through to one working their way back from injury.

Open a player and see why

Which muscles are doing the work, and which part of the leg is carrying the load, rather than a single number with nothing behind it.

Knowing when to doubt it

A dropped signal or a flat battery is shown as exactly that, instead of leaving a number on screen that quietly stopped updating.

The call stays with your staff. What Ares changes is how much they can see before they make it.

Where it stands

Working

Reading the leg

We put our sleeve on the same leg as a lab-grade research sensor and it stayed within 3% of it, right through a full walking trial. That is the model driving the console above.

In build

The sleeve

Designed and engineered through to the materials. Getting the electrodes bonded into compression fabric that survives a season is what is being tested now.

Muscle sensing and the score

The electrodes are designed and going into build. Reading muscle through the sleeve itself is the next milestone, and the squads we work with are where that data comes from.

Research we are building on

Reading motion and muscle together to flag injury risk is published, peer-reviewed work — a study in Scientific Reports got it right more than nine times out of ten across fifty athletes. Those are their results, not ours. Building it into something a club can put on a player is the job in front of us.

See the research

See it on your athletes

A season of training. In-person fitting for every player in the cohort. Athena included.

Melbourne Bionics is an active pilot and research partner with key Australian sports organisations.

Request a pilot Talk to our team