Development of a simple algorithm to detect big air jumps and jumps during skiing

Abstract

Jumping is an important task in skiing, snowboarding, ski jumping, figure skating, volleyball and many other sports. In these examples, jumping tasks are a performance criterion, and therefore detailed insight into them is important for athletes and coaches. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce a simple and easy-to-implement jump detection algorithm for skiing using acceleration data from inertial measurement units attached to ski boots. The algorithm uses the average of the absolute vertical accelerations of the two boots. We provide results for different parameter settings of the algorithm and two types of jumps: Big Air jumps and jumps during skiing. The latter are divided into small (time of flight < 500 ms) and medium (time of flight ≥ 500 ms) jumps. The algorithm detects 100% of Big Air, 94% of medium and 44% of small jumps. In addition, the settings with the highest detection rates also have the highest number of overdetected jumps. To resolve this conflict, a penalty-adjusted score that considers the number of overdetected jumps in the final performance analysis is proposed.