Wearable Devices for Sports: New Integrated Technologies Allow Coaches, Physicians, and Trainers to Better Understand the Physical Demands of Athletes in Real time

Abstract

Elite-level athletes and professional sports teams are continually searching for opportunities to improve athletic performance and gain a competitive advantage on the field. Advances in technology have provided new avenues to maximize player health and safety. Over the last decade, time?motion analysis systems, such as video recording and computer digitization, have been used to measure human locomotion and improve sports performance. While these techniques were state of the art at the time, their usefulness is inhibited by the questionable validity of the acquired data, the labor-intensive nature of collecting data with manual hand-notation techniques, and their inability to track athlete position, movement, displacement, and velocity.