Automatic jump detection method for athlete monitoring and performance in volleyball

• Published in: International journal of performance analysis in sport 2015-03, Vol.15 (1), p.284-296
• Main Authors: Gageler, H. William, Wearing, Scott, James, A. Daniel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Inertial Sensor; Jump Height; Sport; Volleyball; Workload
• ISSN: 2474-8668; 1474-8185; 1474-8185
• DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2015.11868793

Athlete performance and monitoring is an area of interest across many sporting codes, for indoor sports however, the primary methods of athlete monitoring are manually recording statistics or video analysis. This paper contains two studies, the first to validate an automatic jump detection method which was developed using inertial sensors and the second to determine the accuracy at which the time of flight (ToF) can be detected using this method. To evaluate the automatic jump detection method both male (n=7) and female (n=5) volleyball players performed a total of 1201 jumps manually identified on video during a typical training session. Of these 1201 jumps, the method correctly identified 1144 (95%) jumps in the inertial data with only 57 (5%) being false negatives and 54 (4%) false positives. The ToF was then found to be underestimated with a mean error of -0.015s ± 0.058s when compared to the ToF obtained from a force plate. Overall the system provided a means to quickly and easily track the number of jumps being performed by each player and the approximate ToF of each jump when compared to existing methods.