Enhancing support for optimal muscle usage in sports: coaching and skill-improvement tracking with sEMG

Abstract

Cardiopulmonary function and power as well as efficient motion skill are extremely important for athletes. Thanks to the latest sensing technology and smart devices, many researchers have focused on sports-skill analysis. Electromyography (EMG), in particular, is gaining attention as a method of understanding the power-generating process in motions. However, most existing applications using EMG have remained being one-time measurement. This is because athletes do not know how to use the results and how to measure their improvement. We propose a sports-skill-training framework with muscle-usage indicators based on EMG and an EMG live visualization system. With this framework, athletes can determine the skill they need to improve by focusing on skills whose indicators are poor, activate their muscles with live feedback to overcome weaknesses, and quantitatively measure their improvement as the improvement of the indicators during the activation training. We also verified the effect of coaching in this framework on cycling athletes. The experimental results quantitatively indicate the effectiveness of continuous skill training with our framework.