Sports injury is common in college as huge medical expenses were spent on sport related injuries among youth each year. Existing technology for sports and fitness have been rapidly developing which allow people to monitor their biometric information through modern sensing systems including heart rate and motion sensors. Professional sports teams were using high-end motion capture systems, such as Xsens, Catapult and Qualisys, to track and analyze athletes’ performance during training and competitions. However, there was no consumer-level product which can allow general users to obtain their motion data during sports. Therefore, there is a need of developing an affordable system utilizing motion sensing technology to facilitate performance training and rehabilitation for college sports....[ Read more ]

Sports injury is common in college as huge medical expenses were spent on sport related injuries among youth each year. Existing technology for sports and fitness have been rapidly developing which allow people to monitor their biometric information through modern sensing systems including heart rate and motion sensors. Professional sports teams were using high-end motion capture systems, such as Xsens, Catapult and Qualisys, to track and analyze athletes’ performance during training and competitions. However, there was no consumer-level product which can allow general users to obtain their motion data during sports. Therefore, there is a need of developing an affordable system utilizing motion sensing technology to facilitate performance training and rehabilitation for college sports. In this thesis, a hardware and software system was built to monitor the athletes during training and rehabilitation. The system could enable features such as detecting incorrect movement, preventing from overtraining, remote guided physiotherapy, etc., which aims at reducing the injury rate and improve their performance.

Fit-Kick, a sensor-embedded ankle sleeve, was designed to track the motion of the ankle. It consists of two inertial sensors to capture the movement of the shin and foot using kinematic computation. Based on the high-level requirement discussed, three prototypes with iterating mechanical designs were built and tested, using 3D printing and Room Temperature Vulcanization (RTV) silicone casting. Components were selected and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) were fabricated. With manufacturing considerations, several industrial design drafts were discussed and an industrial prototype was produced to validate the product concept. An Android application was developed to work with the latest Fit-Kick prototype, delivering features for running and guided physiotherapy.