Sensing for Stride Information of Sprinters

Accurate sprint-related information, such as stride times, stance times, stride lengths, continuous Centre-of-Mass (CoM) displacements and split times of sprinters are important to both sprint coaches and biomechanics researchers. These information are traditionally captured using camera-based systems which are very expensive and time-consuming to setup. This paper investigates through a series of experiments whether an integrated sensing system would provide a practical, cost-effective alternative to measuring stride-related information of sprinters. The results show that the system achieves an accuracy within 5ms for stance time and stride time measurements, and ~10cm for localisationrelated information such as CoM forward displacement and CoM stride displacement (i.e. stride length).