Wearable Biometric Performance Measurement System for Combat Sports

This paper presents the design of a wearable system for measurements of athlete's performance in combat sports. The system provides objective measurements of athletes' shots, posture, and movements, and of the effectiveness of their training. The proposed instrumentation is useful to overcome the limits of traditional training methods, which are characterized by a subjective evaluation of the training effectiveness by a coach. The measuring system consists of a distributed network of three battery-powered wireless-sensing node types, worn by the athletes, and one master node, which is in charge of signal acquisition and processing tasks. The master node elaborates training statistics and visualizes them, either in real time during a combat session, or off-line for posttraining analysis. The wearable measuring system has been tested through real combat training sessions of athletes with different weights, ages, and experiences, both male and female. Different from the state-of-art athletes' biometric measurement machines, which are cumbersome and expensive, the proposed system is designed to ensure a low-cost and wearable implementation and to give easy-to-understand feedbacks during training, particularly to nonprofessional athletes.