Real-Time Evaluation System For Top Taekwondo Athletes: Project Overview

Assessing athletes' performance is a constant challenge for coaches, whatever the sport is. In some sports there are no technological solutions to assist coaches in this task. This is the case of Taekwondo, where currently the methods used are mainly manual. Following this trend, this article presents the work developed in a PhD project whose main objective is the development of a friendly and low-cost system for assessing the performance of Taekwondo athletes in real time. Thus, the system uses a 3D camera with depth sensor (Orbbec Astra), a computer and software developed for data collection and processing. The system also provides the inclusion of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). The system allows an accurate feedback for the correction or improvement of the athletes techniques, enabling an increase in the athletes performance in a shorter period of time. In all, the project contributes to the evolution of the techniques used during Taekwondo training, as well as to the technological development in the practice of Taekwondo.