sportSemble

A high speed wearable wireless sensor network that enables direct measurement and analysis of the extreme forces that an athlete's body experiences during activity. These measurements allow sports medicine doctors to understand, treat and prevent sports injuries.

Current sports medicine practices for understanding the motion of athletes while engaged in their sport of choice are limited to camera based marker tracking systems that generally lack fidelity and sampling rates necessary to make medically usable measurements, plus typically require a structured, stable "studio" environment and need considerable time to set up and calibrate. Sportsemble bypasses these issues by directly measuring the extreme acceleration and rotational forces acting on an athlete ten times faster than standard camera systems, and can be used anywhere with minimal setup time.

The data from our system provides the ability to understand the forces and torques that an athletes joints and body segments undergo during activity. It also allows for precise biomechanical modeling of an athletes motion. These two married together give the ability to recognize and analyze different styles of athletic gesture.

Based on this analysis it is possible to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ motion. ‘Good’ motion is considered to be motion that has less potential for an athlete to injure themselves (less stress on joints) and ‘bad’ is motion that has more potential to cause injury (more stress on joints and limbs). Accordingly, in collaboration with the Sports Medicine Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, we are exploring the application of sportSemble in diagnosis, evaulation, therapy, and training of sports players.