Wearables for integrative performance and tactic analyses: opportunities, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have reduced drastically in size, cost, and power consumption, while improving accuracy. The combination of different sensor technologies is considered a promising step in the monitoring of athletes. Those “wearables” enable the capturing of relevant physiological and tactical information in individual and team sports and thus replacing subjective, time-consuming and qualitative methods with objective, quantitative ones. Prior studies mainly comprised sports categories such as: targeting sports, batting and fielding games as well as net and wall games, focusing on the detection of individual, non-locomotive movements. The increasing capabilities of wearables allow for more complex and integrative analysis expanding research into the last category: invasion sports. Such holistic approaches allow the derivation of metrics, estimation of physical conditions and the analysis of team strategic behavior, accompanied by integrative knowledge gains in technical, tactical, physical, and mental aspects of a sport. However, prior and current researchers find the precise measurement of the actual movement within highly dynamic and non-linear movement difficult. Thus, the present article showcases an overview of the environments in which the wearables are employed. It elaborates their use in individual as well as team-related performance analyses with a special focus on reliability and validity, challenges, and future directions.