Detection of Illegal Race Walking: A Tool to Assist Coaching and Judging

James B Lee; Rebecca Mellifont; Brendan J Burkett; D A James

doi:10.3390/s131216065

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Detection of Illegal Race Walking: A Tool to Assist Coaching and Judging

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Detection of Illegal Race Walking: A Tool to Assist Coaching and Judging

James B Lee, Rebecca Mellifont, Brendan J Burkett and D A James

Sensors, Vol.13(12), pp.16065-16074

2013

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s131216065

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Abstract

athletics

gait

inertial sensor

Olympics

step

Current judging of race walking in international competitions relies on subjective human observation to detect illegal gait, which naturally has inherent problems. Incorrect judging decisions may devastate an athlete and possibly discredit the international governing body. The aim of this study was to determine whether an inertial sensor could improve accuracy, monitor every step the athlete makes in training and/or competition. Seven nationally competitive race walkers performed a series of legal, illegal and self-selected pace races. During testing, athletes wore a single inertial sensor (100 Hz) placed at S1 of the vertebra and were simultaneously filmed using a high-speed camera (125 Hz). Of the 80 steps analyzed the high-speed camera identified 57 as illegal, the inertial sensor misidentified four of these measures (all four missed illegal steps had 0.008 s of loss of ground contact) which is considerably less than the best possible human observation of 0.06 s. Inertial sensor comparison to the camera found the typical error of estimate was 0.02 s (95% confidence limits 0.01-0.02), with a bias of 0.02 (±0.01). An inertial sensor can thus objectively improve the accuracy in detecting illegal steps (loss of ground contact) and, along with the ability to monitor every step of the athlete, could be a valuable tool to assist judges during race walk events.

Details

Title: Detection of Illegal Race Walking: A Tool to Assist Coaching and Judging
Authors: James B Lee (Author) - Charles Darwin University
Rebecca Mellifont (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering
Brendan J Burkett (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering
D A James (Author) - Griffith University
Publication details: Sensors, Vol.13(12), pp.16065-16074
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date published: 2013
DOI: 10.3390/s131216065
ISSN: 1424-8220
Copyright note: Copyright © 2013 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Organisation Unit: Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Health and Sport Sciences - Legacy; School of Health - Sports & Exercise Science
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99448627402621
Output Type: Journal article

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