Athlete Performance

Wearable technology for monitoring and enhancing athletic performance

Athletic performance measures are critical for understanding an athlete’s explosive power and strength. Traditional methods for calculating metrics like the Reactive Strength Index (RSI) require expensive force plates that are stationary and difficult to deploy in field settings. Our research explores using low-cost, lightweight inertial measurement units (IMUs) as alternative for measuring athlete performance.

Our recent work applies the low-cost measures, and high-fidelity motion capture, to assist JMU Softball in evaluating athlete performance and recovery.

Reactive Strength Index Research

Undergraduate researcher Stephen Mitchell led a multi-year effort to validate IMU-based measurements of the Drop Jump Ratio, a key component of calculating RSI. His work demonstrated that low-cost wearable sensors can effectively capture the kinematic data needed to assess athletic performance without the limitations of traditional force plates.

Stephen Mitchell presenting his RSI research results at SIEDS 2021

Stephen’s research was presented at MARCUS 2019, IEEE SouthEast Conference 2021, and SIEDS 2021. See the Publications & Presentations section below for details.

This work was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Stu Thompson (Bucknell University, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Dr. Rosha Wunderlich (JMU Biology).

JMU Softball Collaboration

Content coming soon - collaboration with JMU Softball program on wearable performance monitoring.

JMU Softball in the Wearable Computing Lab

Publications & Presentations

  • Stephen Mitchell, Jason Forsyth, and Michael S. Thompson, “Exploring Amateur Performance in Athletic Tests Using Wearable Sensors,” IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS), Charlottesville, VA, 2021 (full paper, abstract reviewed). [Publication]
  • Stephen Mitchell, Jason Forsyth, and Michael Thompson, “Assessing Athletic Performance with a Wearable Inertial Measurement Unit,” presentation at the 2021 IEEE SouthEast Conference (short paper). [Publication]
  • Stephen Mitchell, “IMU-based Drop Jump Measurements,” poster presentation at the Mid-Atlantic Research Conference in Undergraduate Scholarship (MARCUS), 2019. [Publication]