Abstract
The standard technology used to capture motion for biomechanical analysis in sports has employed marker-based optical systems. While these systems are excellent at providing positional information, they suffer from a limited ability to accurately provide fundamental quantities such as velocity and acceleration (hence forces and torques) during high-speed motion typical of many sports. Conventional optical systems require considerable setup time, can exhibit sensitivity to extraneous light, and generally sample too slowly to accurately capture extreme bursts of athletic activity. In recent years, wireless wearable sensors have begun to penetrate devices used in sports performance assessment, offering potential solutions to these limitations. This article, after determining pressing problems in sports that such sensors could solve and surveying the state-of-the-art in wearable motion capture for sports, presents a wearable dual-range inertial and magnetic sensor platform that we developed to enable an end-to-end investigation of high-level, very wide dynamic-range biomechanical parameters. We tested our system on collegiate and elite baseball pitchers, and have derived and measured metrics to glean insight into performance-relevant motion. As this was, we believe, the first ultra-wide-range wireless multipoint and multimodal inertial and magnetic sensor array to be used on elite baseball pitchers, we trace its development, present some of our results, and discuss limitations in accuracy from factors such as soft-tissue artifacts encountered with extreme motion. In addition, we discuss new metric opportunities brought by our systems that may be relevant for the assessment of micro-trauma in baseball.
Highlights
Elbow and shoulder injuries among baseball players, in particular pitchers, continue to be a concern despite maximum pitch count recommendations and regulations [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Using systems that evolved from our initial prototypes fielded in 2006, this paper reports one of the earliest efforts, to our knowledge, of providing reliable sports data using portable wireless wearable electronics that leverage an ultra-wide-range wireless multipoint inertial and magnetic sensor array
Discussion and torques placed on joints susceptible to injury during ballistic motions and repetitive microtrauma
Summary
Elbow and shoulder injuries among baseball players, in particular pitchers, continue to be a concern despite maximum pitch count recommendations and regulations [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Ligament and muscular damage at the elbow and shoulder has been associated with the repeated micro trauma sustained by these structures during the demands of high-speed throwing and pitching [1,7,8]. Optical motion capture is the standard tool that sports medicine biomechanists and clinicians use to study the mechanics of motion and their correlation with injuries. These systems provide data to guide diagnosis, treatment, training modifications, return to sport, or removal from training
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