Abstract

Race walking is a discipline in which the best chronometric performance is constrained by infringements. Currently, the judgment and training of race walkers is entrusted to subjective observations made by judges. In this paper, with the objective of supporting coaching and judging, we present a wearable inertial sensor system (IART) for the evaluation of performances and infringements in race walking. The system is composed of an inertial sensor positioned close to the center of mass of the subject and a management unit designed for coaches and judges. IART allows: (i) a step sequence classification according to the competition rules; (ii) a customized assessment of elite race walkers based on key performance and infringement indices. The system is experimentally validated in field conditions by nine world-class Olympic race walkers. The results show that IART improves the current evaluation of step sequences and offers a meaningful support for the overall evaluation of the technical gesture.

Highlights

  • The recent history shows that, at various levels and in many disciplines, the technological evolution has radically changed the way the sport is approached from the point of view of monitoring, judging, and training

  • We choose five different speeds in order to obtain a good overview of the response of the proposed approach in relation to athletes’ range of speeds

  • For each race walking test, excluding the initial acceleration phase of the athlete (10 s), 180 consecutive steps were considered related to six sequences of steps

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Summary

Introduction

The recent history shows that, at various levels and in many disciplines, the technological evolution has radically changed the way the sport is approached from the point of view of monitoring, judging, and training. In race walking, according to rule 230 of the IAAF competition rules [1], the athlete could occur in two possible infringements: “bent knee” and “loss of ground contact” (LOGC). The most common infringement is LOGC, as resulting from the last main international events [2]. It is worth noticing that nowadays judges and coaches can rely only on their subjective observations (made by human eyes); to date, technology is not used to support judging decisions. By relying mainly on subjective observations, there is a critical issue during race walking competitions: the very short duration of the loss of ground contact events (few hundredths of a second) generates difficulties for the proper identification of a correct/incorrect gesture [3]

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