Review of Sensing Modalities for Physical Competency Assessment

Physical competency assessments are vital in the fields such as sports and medicine to study and predict sports incurred injuries and long-term musculoskeletal injuries. These assessments have been attempted by various sensor modalities such as vision based sensors, ambient sensors and wearable sensors. These sensors are used exclusively to collect information on the human body characteristic and human kinematics to assess fitness of the athletes. This paper reviews and compares the capabilities of wearable and non-wearable sensing modalities in sports domain. Wearable sensors such as impact force sensors, mechanical-based measurement and electrophysiological measurement are popular to extract ground contact and muscle activity with the attached markers. Non-wearable sensors such as force insole, radio frequency measurement and vision-based measurement can detect human motions and joint angle without the requirement of body contact. These sensors are compared in term of its complexity of the assessments and its utility within the algorithms of a single modal and multi-modal system.