Algorithmic approaches to quantify coordination between people in contact team sports

Thesis

Thesis outline In Chapter 1, the background, research aims, and limitations to the study have been explained. In Chapter 2, a systematic literature review is provided, exploring the research question: Can coordination be used to predict injury? The absence of a concrete and agreed-upon definition for coordination is shown, alongside the absence of a generally-applicable coordination measurement method. A broadly applicable definition of coordination is developed. In Chapter 3, the Coordination Game is developed. A control dataset is collected and analysed using a simple correlation by association method (Pearson correlation coefficients) and IMUs on pairs of participants. A general range of Pearson correlation coefficients is shown to classify whether a pair of participants are most likely coordinated or most likely uncoordinated; however, the classification of coordination is not concrete per person with this methodology, only with multiple tests of multiple participants. A more complex methodology must be tested. In Chapter 4, machine learning classifiers are utilized to classify segments of coordinated and uncoordinated tasks, specifically, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) Kernel and the coarse K-nearest neighbours classifiers. These classification methodologies did not perform as well as expected, only obtaining testing accuracy scores of 62.1% and 55.6%, maximum. Further implementation of classification methods should be explored, as only the surface of machine learning has been delved into in this work. In Chapter 5, an overview of this research and essential future work is discussed.

Authors: Levens, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-bdpg160dr
• Type of award: MSc by Research
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: contact team sport; sport performance; coordination; coordination between people; inertial measurement units; injury prediction; group coordination; coordination definition
• Subjects: Biomedical engineering; Biomechanics; Team sports