A Deep Learning Approach for Fatigue Prediction in Sports Using GPS Data and Rate of Perceived Exertion

Monitoring players’ fatigue is essential to maintaining the best performance of players during sports games. The level of fatigue can be measured by the external workload, the aggregated amount of physical activity or internal workload, which is an individual’s psycho-physiological response to that activity. There have been a growing number of studies focusing on the relationship between external and internal workloads for efficient fatigue monitoring. However, they utilize aggregated features to represent the external workload, losing raw data details such as sequential information. This study proposes a deep learning algorithm to predict Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) from players’ movement data instead of aggregated features. Electronic Performance and Tracking Systems (EPTS) powered by GPS sensors collected players’ movement data and the RPE from training and match sessions during a Korean professional soccer team season. We preprocessed the raw GPS data to obtain linear and angular components of velocity, acceleration, and jerk. Our proposed model, named FatigueNet, effectively predicted the RPE with mean absolute error (MAE) = 0.8494 ± 0.0557 and root mean square error (RMSE) = 1.2166 ± 0.0737 using the preprocessed movement features. To interpret the predictions of the FatigueNet, we also performed regression activation mapping to localize the discriminative time intervals that contributed more to the prediction results. Our experimental results imply the possibility of automated and objective fatigue monitoring systems based on deep learning instead of arduous manual data collection from players.