StrideSAFE Update: A New Level of Veterinary “Finesse”

[Wandering Eyes]

In discussing the evolution of his StrideSAFE wearable sensor, Dave Lambert turns to a tufty-haired German philosopher called Arthur Schopenhauer, who described new truths as a play in three parts. “First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

Lambert has had the rejection and a little bit of ridicule, he said. “Some people have thrown rocks at me,” he added, one recent afternoon via Zoom in a brightly lit corner of his Kentucky home, a small bronze horse as his virtual companion. “But it's getting around to universal acceptance now.”

If the bronze had been of the flesh-and-bone kind and trained in Kentucky these past couple of years, chances are it would have worn Lambert's StrideSAFE wearable sensor, used on every horse in every race in the state since May of 2023.

Thanks in huge part to this blanket program in Kentucky, StrideSAFE has now been used on over 55,000 individual starts, providing a rich trove of data to understand just how best to use this system to identify the Holy Grail of racing welfare–those horses that exhibit no visible lameness but harbor a brewing problem that could turn catastrophic without intervention.

The equation is simple: “screen, scan, save.” Use a wearable sensor like StrideSAFE to screen for early potential injuries. Scan the horse for problems. Then if something shows up, give the horse the necessary time off.

It has reached the point where StrideSAFE is now able to identify in which leg the brewing problem is located, and even the type of pathology, the sesamoids versus the condyles (the end of the cannon bone making up part of the fetlock), said Lambert. Brewing injuries in the fetlock are notoriously hard to diagnose.

David Lambert with trainer Dale Romans | StrideSAFE

In a recent TDN letter to the editor, trainer Dale Romans shared his story of a stakes-level trainee that StrideSAFE had flagged for being at increased risk of injury in its right-front sesamoid in its last race, as well as a flag in the start prior.

The horse was visibly sound, but given the StrideSAFE readings, Romans sent it for a precautionary PET scan, which indeed detected worrying bone remodeling in the right-front sesamoid bone.

“This horse is now resting for 90 days and is expected to make a full return to training pending a clean recheck. Without StrideSAFE, we wouldn't have caught it,” Romans wrote.

Nevertheless, the racing community at large is still proving reluctant to more broadly adopt these wearable technologies, said Churchill Downs' equine medical director, Dr. Will Farmer.

“We've come a long way. We've learned a lot. I know StrideSAFE has learned a lot,” said Farmer. “My biggest push with this is that I really would like our horsemen to engage with it.”

What would help, said Lambert, would be to start viewing the sensor as a veterinary tool rather than simply a training aid. As Lambert describes it, “this is about developing a new level of finesse in veterinary medicine.”

 

The Evolution of StrideSAFE

StrideSAFE is a wireless iPhone shaped bio-metric sensor that fits into the saddle cloth. It captures a variety of measurements while a horse is breezing or racing, like its acceleration and deceleration, its up and down concussive movement, and its medial-lateral motion (movement side to side).

David Lambert | StrideSAFE

As Lambert and his team's understanding of what StrideSAFE can do has evolved, so has the way they relay its information.

In earlier iterations, it worked on a traffic light system, with a green for all-clear, a yellow for caution, and a red for possible danger.

Since then, Lambert and his team have refined the system to use a risk factor calculation from one to five, with five the category in which a horse is most at risk of a fatal or career ending injury–nearly 300 times more likely than horses that fall within risk category one.

StrideSAFE has now been used on some 55,000 individual starts at 13 racetracks around the country. Of the 55,000 individual starts–many of them in Kentucky–about 65% of the horses have been given a rating of one, about 25% were classified two, and the remaining 10% fell in the three, four and five range.

Furthermore, during that time, 152 horses suffered catastrophic injuries. “We have [StrideSAFE data for] nearly 400 career races from those 152 horses,” said Lambert. “So, we have longitudinal records on those horses, which is a massive data set.”

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to run the profiles of the horses in this database, Lambert and his team have been able to more thoroughly and quickly refine their machine to better understand which horses are at heightened risk of injury and why.

The most telling rendering of StrideSAFE's efficacy perhaps best lies in individual cases. Lambert is preparing about eight or nine of them for a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.

Lambert tells the story of a one-time Derby prospect, who even as early as May of his two-year-old year was flagged by StrideSAFE during his breezes. The horse then won two of his races in the fall of that year, but in doing so, StrideSAFE showed that something again was amiss, despite being visibly sound.

Equine athlete with StrideSAFE | StrideSAFE

By the time January rolled around, the connections decided to scan the horse, the findings of which indicated he would need 60 days off. But before returning to work, subsequent PET scans and X-rays showed a major problem in the left-front condyle, along with bone remodeling in the other three fetlocks for which time-off was also recommended.

“He was sound to the eye throughout all of that,” said Lambert. “But they operated on it and screwed it [the left front]. He's come back to the races and run three times, had a green flag each of the three times since.”

With all this data under his belt, Lambert has a growing belief that potential problems can be picked up as far back as a year prior to any serious injury occurring.

As Lambert tells it, something occurs that causes the horse serious enough initial pain to show up on StrideSAFE, but which is still not visible to the human eye.

“The horse learns to live with it. The problem will heal a little bit. That's when some bone remodeling goes on. It'll get more stable, doesn't hurt so much. It doesn't show you a strong red anymore. It shows a category two or three instead of a category four or five,” said Lambert, stressing how this isn't a set in stone timeline of pathology.

“But as you get closer and closer to the fatal race, the pain can actually be diminishing because the condition is healing to some extent and stabilizing. But it's still there,” said Lambert. “That's a new way of thinking about these things.”

 

Kentucky Program

Such chronology in the pathology of an injury wouldn't surprise Farmer, he said. “Looking at the necropsy program, we know that these are repetitive use injuries. These aren't singular events. And that fits that idea. It's logical,” he said.

“They're either going to adapt to the issue, or they're going to adjust their strides and we can pick that up with the sensor, but we may not be able to pick it up at the jog,” said Farmer.

This tallies with one of Farmer's main takeaways from the two years that StrideSAFE has been deployed in Kentucky–a program paid for by the tracks. According to Farmer, Churchill Downs has invested nearly $1 million in piloting the technology at its Kentucky tracks.

StrideSAFE's findings, Farmer said, support the overwhelming wealth of evidence that catastrophic injuries aren't caused by a bad step but rather are the accumulative wear and tear over repetitive races and workouts.

“There are horses that we see, they start off as 'ones,' then they go 'twos,' then 'threes,' then 'fours.' And then they ultimately have some diagnostics done, or they end up with a fracture,” said Farmer.

StrideSAFE device | StrideSAFE

As such, StrideSAFE offers “a very unique opportunity” to find the “needle in the haystack,” said Farmer, giving trainers “insight into what's coming down the pipeline before the horse fractures,” or worse, suffers a catastrophic injury.

“Rather than it being a fracture, they can get ahead of it, change training patterns for a period of time,” said Farmer. “The goal is to keep horses safer, healthier and in the racing population longer.”

Despite the promise, acceptance among the racing community is still limited. “The truth is that unfortunately, we don't have many trainers engaging with it,” said Farmer. “For this to really take that next step, we need that trainer engagement.”

Part of the problem is that the information collected by StrideSAFE isn't currently processed and sent back to the trainers in an easily accessible form, said Farmer.

“They need to make it as easy to have access to, whether that's a push–like a text push–with a report, or a reminder. That's something StrideSAFE needs to work out, how the information is relayed,” said Farmer.

For StrideSAFE's part, they're working on a new password protected interactive website for trainers to access, with data on the welfare of the horse, as well as its performance. “In particular, the way in which they fatigue in a race,” Lambert said.

But Lambert is beginning to see the communication issue from a slightly different angle–that the diagnostic component to the utility and effectiveness of StrideSAFE makes it a veterinary tool primarily.

“We're getting very sophisticated information about musculoskeletal health, and it's the vets that need to be the ones that manage that and learn about it,” said Lambert.

 

AAEP Study

StrideSAFE is one of six wearable sensors currently being used in an ongoing study out of the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP). The others are Alogo, Arioneo, Equibase/Stable Analytics, Equimetrics and Garmin.

The goal, said Langsam, is to see which of these technologies can most accurately detect the sort of hard-to-detect emerging injury that requires intervention, said Dr. Sara Langsam, AAEP racing committee chair. Beyond the sesamoids and condyles, think buck-shins and small chips in the joint.

“At the end of the study, we would pass forward this information to HISA [the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act Authority], and they would potentially roll out some sort of integration into the entire industry,” said Langsam.

Dr. Sara Langsam | AAEP WEB

Each of the sensors are being used on at least 100 two-year-olds throughout this year during high-speed workouts. Over 700 individual horses are enrolled.

Each horse that breezes is issued a green, yellow or red rating, with a 48-hour window for the study participants to receive the results. As on ongoing study, there are no concrete findings right now, said Langsam.

The study focused on two-year-olds for several reasons. One was to minimize the variables in the study by using a cohort of horses that haven't already accumulated a lot of pre-existing wear and tear. Another is that two-year-olds offer the best opportunity to intervene as injury progresses.

“We know that about 40 percent of the two-year-olds are going to get an issue. They like to get mild injuries that may take them out of training, but [which are] less catastrophic in general,” said Langsam.

They're hoping to have some kind of conclusion ready for a public airing by the first or second quarter of 2026, said Langsam.

“A lot of low hanging fruit has already been conquered. Technology is going to be the next step to help us get even lower [fatalities]. And while zero is ever achievable or not, that is always the goal,” Langsam said. “And this is just one part of the technological sphere that's going to help us move forward. It's exciting.”

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