Case Study: Rise Science achieves improved athlete performance and reduced injuries with Twilio SMS sleep alerts

Tucking In Professional Athletes via Text Rise Science Improves Performance with Sleep Science

Rise Science, founded by Jeff Kahn and fellow students, applies sleep science to help athletes overcome sleep inertia and perform at their best. They identified that distractions and poor sleep timing left players groggy, slower to react and more prone to mental errors and injuries — a critical problem where fractions of a second matter.

Rise ran a controlled study sending personalized SMS reminders timed to each athlete’s circadian rhythm and scaled the system by moving SMS automation to Twilio. With tailored sleep coaching via text, players sleeping 7–8 hours reported an 8% faster reaction time, a half-step faster start, 50% fewer mental errors in practice, 70% lower injury risk over a season and a 5% improvement in play execution, while Twilio enabled rapid prototyping and seamless scaling.

Rise Science

Jeff Kahn

Co-Founder and CEO