An Alternative Athlete Monitoring System Using Cost-Effective Inertial Sensing Instrumentation

Abstract

An examination of the human gait is feasible using inertial sensing. The embedded accelerometer and gyroscope in an inertial measurement unit can evaluate physical activity-based sports and this unit is relatively affordable compared to global positioning systems or video recording quantification. This study developed a cost-effective sports monitoring investigation method with an inertial sensor attached to the right leg of the athletes. In total, four parameters were simultaneously tracked to assess the entire sensor performance in real-time. The accelerometer measured the typical leg angle when walking and running, whereas the gyroscope processed the raw data to obtain the stride frequency from the time-domain data. Moreover, a comparison between the accelerometer and gyroscope was presented while simultaneously attaining the signal to convert the time-domain data to frequency results. Also, the number of strides and linear velocity was expressed as results in this study. To confirm the results, a statistical hypothesis test was implemented for all obtained results. The results indicated that the inertial sensing instrumentation used in this study is promising and could be an affordable alternative option for a sports monitoring system.