Kinematics Analysis of Arms in Synchronized Canoeing With Wearable Inertial Measurement Unit

Abstract

Synchronized canoeing is a cyclically repetitive sport, and two canoeists need to work in concert with each other’s power patterns and paddle movements to achieve great results. Most of the analyses of synchronized canoeing focus on the mechanics and work output of oars. This article proposes a motion-capture method based on inertial sensors. The extended Kalman filter method is used to fuse the sensor information and reconstruct human movements. Four sets of joint angular movement data of the shoulders and elbows of two canoeists are extracted, respectively, for kinematics analysis with correlation coefficient and dynamic time warping (DTW) method. The experimental results show that there is a significant correlation ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r=0.9605$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) between the shoulder joint angles of the synchronized canoeists. The DTW method can also clearly analyze the posture coordination of two canoeists. According to the analysis results of upper limb kinematics, this research can evaluate the synchronization effect of synchronized canoeing from the perspective of kinematics, help canoeists improve their technical movements, and help coaches reasonably select athletes with matching skills and styles.