The effect of a badminton teaching system using wearable technology

Background and purpose: In traditional physical education, instructors provide feedback to learners mainly based on observing their body motions. However, there is very little research paying attention to measuring muscle... [ view full abstract ]

Background and purpose: In traditional physical education, instructors provide feedback to learners mainly based on observing their body motions. However, there is very little research paying attention to measuring muscle strength with physiological signals for improving badminton skills. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate a badminton teaching system by using the wearable technology called “MYO armband”, to capture the electromyography (EMG) signals. The developed badminton teaching system provides instantaneous recording, automatic grading and instantaneous feedback, these functions can support instructor providing objective feedback to learners. Methods: To design such a teaching system, four professional badminton players(experts) in Taiwan were invited to record their arm muscle strength of two badminton skills — flat shot and smashing using the MYO armband. Once the EMG signals were collected from the four experts, the Mean Absolute Value (MAV) was used to calculate experts’ EMG signal amplitude and then a back propagation artificial neural network was used to train and build the expert badminton model. To validate the accuracy and reliability of the expert badminton model, 10-fold cross-validation accuracy and Kappa statistics was considered by using Waka software. The Kappa coefficient over 0.6 is considered to be fair to good agreement for the expert badminton model. Results: The results showed that the badminton teaching system can effectively monitor learners’ arm muscle strength through the captured EMG signals, and instructor can provide objective feedback to learners based on the report. Conclusions and implications: The developed teaching system shows great impact on the improvement of badminton skills teaching, because learners can better understand how the right amount of arm strength would influence their badminton skills performance. This study may also be applied to racket sports regarding arm strength usage for future research in physical education.