Sensor Data Required for Automatic Recognition of Athletic Tasks Using Deep Neural Networks

Movement screens are used to assess the overall movement quality of an athlete. However, these rely on visual observation of a series of movements and subjective scoring. Data-driven methods to provide objective scoring of these movements are being developed. These currently use optical motion capture and require manual pre-processing of data to identify the start and end points of each movement. Therefore, we aimed to use deep learning techniques to automatically identify movements typically found in movement screens and assess the feasibility of performing the classification based on wearable sensor data. Optical motion capture data were collected on 417 athletes performing 13 athletic movements. We trained an existing deep neural network architecture that combines convolutional and recurrent layers on a subset of 278 athletes. A validation subset of 69 athletes was used to tune the hyperparameters and the final network was tested on the remaining 70 athletes. Simulated inertial measurement data were generated based on the optical motion capture data and the network was trained on this data for different combinations of body segments. Classification accuracy was similar for networks trained using the optical and full-body simulated inertial measurement unit data at 90.1 and 90.2%, respectively. A good classification accuracy of 85.9% was obtained using as few as three simulated sensors placed on the torso and shanks. However, using three simulated sensors on the torso and upper arms or fewer than three sensors resulted in poor accuracy. These results for simulated sensor data indicate the feasibility of classifying athletic movements using a small number of wearable sensors. This could facilitate objective data-driven methods that automatically score overall movement quality using wearable sensors to be easily implemented in the field.