Abstract
Athletic performance, technique assessment, and injury prevention are all important aspects in sports for both professional and amateur athletes. Wearable technology is attracting the research community’s interest because of its capability to provide real-time biofeedback to coaches and athletes when on the field and outside of more restrictive laboratory conditions. In this paper, a novel wearable motion sensor-based system has been designed and developed for athletic performance assessment during running and jumping tasks. The system consists of a number of components involving embedded systems (hardware and software), back-end analytics, information and communications technology (ICT) platforms, and a graphical user interface for data visualization by the coach. The system is able to provide automatic activity recognition, estimation of running and jumping metrics, as well as vertical ground reaction force (GRF) predictions, with sufficient accuracy to provide valuable information as regards training outcomes. The developed system is low-power, sufficiently small for real-world scenarios, easy to use, and achieves the specified communication range. The system’s high sampling rate, levels of accuracy and performance enables it as a performance evaluation tool able to support coaches and athletes in their real-world practice.
Highlights
Athletic performance, technique assessment, and injury prevention are all aspects of great importance in sports at present, for coaches and athletes alike, and are experiencing a growth in interest from the research community
AsAs confirmed from predictionsof ofthe thevertical verticalGRFs confirmed fromthe theRMSE
It can be concluded that, even though the precision achieved may not be sufficient for some metrics, overall, the developed wearable system may satisfactorily predict some of the considered jumping metrics and provide an acceptable monitoring system for athletes’ performance
Summary
Technique assessment, and injury prevention are all aspects of great importance in sports at present, for coaches and athletes alike, and are experiencing a growth in interest from the research community. Wearable sensors represent an alternative to gold-standard lab-based assessments because of their potential to monitor performance without hindering it while providing real-time feedback with no space limitation or infrastructure set-up procedures, as well as their advantages in the areas of portability, low-cost, and ease-of-use [3,4,5]. Can provide important insights into the kinetics potentially responsible for injurious tissue loads, as well as indicate the effectiveness of an intervention [8]. Coaches’ decision-making can be greatly enhanced by the use of wearable sensors to ensure that a biomechanical intervention is truly helping the athletes by minimizing the risk of running-related injuries [8]
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