Abstract des Autors

In highly dynamical sports such as track and field jump events, athletes must be able to generate high forces within a very short time and in an appropriate manner. Objective feedback on performance is crucial to ensure a high quality of training as intrinsic information is merely available to the athlete due to the high movement velocities. Miniature solid-state inertial measurement units (IMU) offers new opportunities for in-field diagnosis as they allow to overcome restrictions of optometric systems or force platforms, and therefore reduce drawbacks on athletes’ performance. Combined with wireless data transmission, IMU can be used to provide athletes and coaches with fast and accurate performance measurements to improve athletic development and elite performance. This paper describes the development and validation of an inertial sensor based device for an ubiquitous monitoring for multiple athletes during training sessions. The development included hard- and software, algorithm for jump detection and an evaluation study (ten participants performed Drop Jumps of different heights). Mean differences of 3.4ms for stance duration and a confidence interval ranging from 0.16 to -0.16 for reactive strength index indicate the developed device as a suitable tool for a field based jump diagnosis with multiple athletes.