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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 5258 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Applied Sciences |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 5 Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
© 2021 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Funding Information:
This publication was supported by Enterprise Ireland and Setanta College Ltd. under grant agreement no. IP 2017 0606. This project is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under Ireland’s European Structural and Investment Funds Programmes 2014–2020. Aspects of this publication have emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 12/RC/2289-P2 INSIGHT-2 which is co-funded under the ERDF.
Keywords
- Accelerometer
- GRF
- Ground reaction force
- IMU
- Inertial measurement unit
- Jumping
- Performance
- Running
- Sport
- Wearables