Mental Performance in Competition

Australian Sports Commission · 2021

government sport research iOS iPadOS

A research app for the Australian Institute of Sport that measures athletes' mental performance — psychometric surveys and reaction-time tasks with stimulus timing precise to a single frame — collecting consented research data and delivering it securely to ASC systems.

Elite sport is decided in fractions of a second — and so is the science behind it. Mental Performance in Competition (MPC) is a research app we build for the Australian Institute of Sport that helps researchers understand what’s happening in an athlete’s head: how they concentrate, how they respond under pressure, and how fast their reactions really are.

  • The "What is the project about?" screen, with an illustration of a cyclist picturing themselves racing towards a finish line, beside text introducing the research project.
  • The Games Ready task list. Information and Consent sits at the top, with the six research tasks below it greyed out until consent is completed.

iPad screenshots

What it does

  • A complete research session in one guided flow

    Information and consent (signature drawn right on the screen), three psychometric surveys, and three timed cognitive tasks, collected into a single research response.

  • Seriously precise timing

    The reaction-time tasks display stimuli for as little as 8 milliseconds, exactly one frame on a 120Hz ProMotion display.

  • Signed in, sealed, delivered

    Athletes sign in with their Sport Connect account, and completed responses travel over an authenticated, encrypted path into the ASC's own cloud storage.

  • Happy off the grid

    The whole session runs locally on the device, so the network is only needed at sign-in and submission.

Behind the app

An 8-millisecond stimulus leaves no room for approximation. At that scale, “roughly when the screen updated” isn’t good enough — which is why MPC is a native iOS app through and through. Frame presentation is scheduled against the display’s own refresh cycle, and reaction times are measured from the hardware’s touch-event timestamps rather than when the software got around to noticing. It’s the kind of precision a web page simply can’t promise.

MPC also tells a story about maintaining software well. The app began life on Apple’s ResearchKit framework, and as the years passed we found ourselves maintaining a patched copy of a large framework that was holding the app back from modern Swift. So in 2026 we removed it entirely — rebuilding every task on a bespoke, generic SwiftUI flow engine of our own. Each task, from consent to surveys to the timed activities, is now just a declared sequence of typed screens run by one engine, built purely on first-party Apple frameworks with no third-party dependencies at all. The research protocol, the data model and the integrations came through the migration unchanged; the codebase came out dramatically simpler to maintain.

Like most of our favourite projects, MPC is a long-term collaboration: developed iteratively over several years, shaped by feedback from the researchers who run the sessions and the athletes who sit them.