ABSTRACT
Athletic and clinical testing for performance analysis and enhancement has traditionally been performed in the laboratory where the required instrumentation is available and environmental conditions can be easily controlled. Today however we see the emergence of small, portable technologies being applied to the sporting environment. One such technology that has seen rapid development in recent years is in the area of inertial sensors. These sensors respond to minute changes in inertia in the linear and radial directions. Such sensors have been utilised in a variety of sports related monitoring projects such as monitoring elite swimmers (Ohgi, 2002; Davey et al., 2004), monitoring rowing (Lai et al., 2005), athlete gait analysis (Billing et al., 2003, Channells et al., 2006) and a variety of other uses including estimating athlete energy expenditure (Wixted et al. 2006), assessing limb segment acceleration (Kavanagh et al., 2006), studying swordsmanship and multi-limb motion monitoring (James et al., 2005), combative sports (Partridge et al., 2005), and others. Both the architecture and implementation of an operating system suitable for use in such sensor systems has been utilised as a teaching tool at University and by other organisations.
