A non-battery pressure detection and communication system for basketball game referee based on piezoelectric devices

Abstract

How to replace the referee in sports with artificial intelligence has attacked a huge amount of attention recently. In this paper, non-battery pressure detection and communication system are designed and fabricated aiming to help the referee in the basketball games. To get the information from player and ball at the same time, the designed system is consisted of three parts, including the basketball monitoring system, the shoes monitoring system, and the laptop to collect and process the data. For the basketball monitoring system, eight piezoelectric polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) flexible thin films are used as the sensor on the surface of the basketball with the sensitivity of 0.065 V/N and four hard piezoelectric Lead Zirconium titanite (PZT) patches are set inside the ball as the power source. As for the shoes monitoring system, four PZT patches work as both power source and pressure sensor with a sensitivity of 0.025 V/N. To solve the referee problem in basketball game, time delay of different systems is first measured. The different systems have similar time delay of about 3s, which will help to make sure whether the players break the rules. In this paper, whether the player has a traveling violation in a game can be refereed by the collected data, which has more than 97% accuracy. This work shows an innovative progress in automatic referees in games and the Internet of Things (IoT) in the human health monitoring.