A pilot study on quantitative analysis for table tennis block using a 3D accelerometer

Table tennis is one of the most important Olympic sports, however there were few researches on how to determine or improve the skill level of the players. Accelerometer has received significant attentions due to its compact size, low power consumption and easy integration within a wearable BSN(Body Sensor Networks) node. In this paper a BSN based method using accelarometers was presented to find out the characteristics of players' performance in table tennis block by quantitative analysis. The BSN node was attached to the front of forearm of the racket hand to record the hand activities. Sixteen subjects with different skill levels, which were divided into three groups(advanced, intermediate, and fresh ), participated in this study. Each subject was required to block 100 balls with the same skill. The experiments showed that acceleration was competent for this study, the standard deviations of 100 blocks of the three groups were 0.10, 0.149, and 0.197, respectively, which meaned that better controlled performance was an important feature of higher level, and actions in front-back direction have the biggest impact on table tennis block.