Impact and workload are dominating on-field data monitoring techniques to track health and well-being of team-sports athletes

Abstract

Participation in sports has become an essential part of healthy living in today’s world. However, injuries can often occur during sports participation. With advancements in sensor technology and data analytics, many sports have turned to technology-aided, data-driven, on-field monitoring techniques to help prevent injuries and plan better player management. This review searched three databases, Web of Science, IEEE, and PubMed, for peer-reviewed articles on on-field data monitoring techniques that are aimed at improving the health and well-being of team-sports athletes. It was found that most on-field data monitoring methods can be categorized as either player workload tracking or physical impact monitoring. Many studies covered during this review attempted to establish correlations between captured physical and physiological data, as well as injury risk. In these studies, workloads are frequently tracked to optimize training and prevent overtraining in addition to overuse injuries, while impacts are most often tracked to detect and investigate traumatic injuries. This review found that current sports monitoring practices often suffer from a lack of standard metrics and definitions. Furthermore, existing data-analysis models are created on data that are limited in both size and diversity. These issues need to be addressed to create ecologically valid approaches in the future.

Weekly Fluctuations in, and Associations Between, Salivary Hormone Responses, Load, and Well-Being During the Pre-season in Professional Male Basketball Players

“…In implementing a holistic, multifaceted monitoring system, measurement of perceptual well-being is advocated alongside the assessment of player responses (i.e., hormonal responses, sRPE, and heart rate) and external load (i.e., PlayerLoad [PL] and PL•minute 21 ) in team sport environments (14,44). Accordingly, there has been increased interest in understanding player wellbeing among sports practitioners and researchers (14).…”

“…In implementing a holistic, multifaceted monitoring system, measurement of perceptual well-being is advocated alongside the assessment of player responses (i.e., hormonal responses, sRPE, and heart rate) and external load (i.e., PlayerLoad [PL] and PL•minute 21 ) in team sport environments (14,44). Accordingly, there has been increased interest in understanding player wellbeing among sports practitioners and researchers (14). Although various components encompassing emotional, mental, social, and physical domains may underpin player well-being (25), it is particularly useful for basketball practitioners to understand how specific measures collected through their monitoring system affect player well-being.…”

A Case for an Oral Cavity-Based Respiratory Rate Sensor System

“…The health and well-being of athletes can be improved via monitoring of their internal loads (physiological responses to physical workloads) [1]. Two methods in particular, survey-based ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) and heart-rate-based metrics, have been dominating the field of on-field internal load monitoring.…”

Development of Athlete Health Monitoring and Early Warning System Based on Sensor Data

“…These studies, alongside others such as Zhang (2022),Wu (2022), and Tanna and Vithalani (2023), collectively contribute to the advancement of athlete health monitoring through innovative sensor-based approaches, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of sports science and technology. The research conducted byCheng and Bergmann (2022) underscores the significance of on-field data monitoring techniques in tracking the health and well-being of team-sports athletes, shedding light on the practical implications of sensor-based monitoring in dynamic sporting environments.Guo and Cui (…”