Lightweight Football Motion Recognition and Intensity Analysis Using Low-Cost Wearable Sensors

In recent years, machine learning has been utilized in health informatics and sports science. There is a great demand and development potential for combining the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to be applied to football sports. The conventional teaching and training methods of football sports have limited collection and mining of real raw data using wearable devices, and lack human motion capture and gesture recognition based on sports science theories. In this study, a low-cost AI + IoT system framework is designed to recognize football motion and analyze motion intensity. To reduce the communication delay and the computational resource consumption caused by data operations, a multitask learning model is designed to achieve motion recognition and intensity estimation. The model can perform classification and regression tasks in parallel and output the results simultaneously. A feature extraction scheme is designed in the initial data processing, and feature data augmentation is performed to solve the small sample data problem. To evaluate the performance of the designed football motion recognition algorithm, this paper proposes a data extraction experimental scheme to complete the data collection of different motions. Model validation is performed using three publicly available datasets, and the features learning strategies are analyzed. Finally, experiments are conducted on the collected football motion datasets and the experimental results show that the designed multitask model can perform two tasks simultaneously and can achieve high computational efficiency. The multitasking single-layer long short-term memory (LSTM) network with 32 neural units can achieve the accuracy of 0.8372, F1 score of 0.8172, mean average precision (mAP) of 0.7627, and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.6117, while the multitasking single-layer LSTM network with 64 neural units can achieve the accuracy of 0.8407, F1 score of 0.8132, mAP of 0.7728, and MAE of 0.5966.