Upper limb analysis using wearable sensors for cricket

Upper limb motion analysis gives a distinct advantage to both player and coach alike to help improve key parameters related to bowling in cricket, including detection of bowling actions that may be considered illegal within the rules of the game. Motion capturing using MARG (Magnetic, Angular Rate and Gravity) is increasingly becoming popular in various sports and health applications, especially with regards to dynamic environments where conventional vision based methods show limitations. This paper outlines an alternative approach to analyze upper limb motion using MARG wearable sensors, compared to traditional vision based motion capture systems which can be quite costly and fail to fully simulate on-field conditions. The approach uses three MARG sensors mounted on specific locations of the bowler's arm. The critical bowling window is automatically detected from the start of the arm action to the point of ball release, the extension angle measured in order to determine the legality of the delivery. Infield testing was carried out among bowlers from a leading cricket academy in Sri Lanka, where each bowler was given a set of deliveries to bowl under a prescribed testing protocol. Further development of this method will involve expanding to a full body monitoring system with an extended software tool that will be useful for coaches, trainers and sports science researchers. This will extend the usefulness of this approach beyond cricket to diagnose technique and posture related sports injuries, opening a wide range of opportunities to examine performance parameters widely used in sport science.