AI-assisted Automatic Jump Detection and Height Estimation in Volleyball Using a Waist-worn IMU

The physical load of jumps plays a critical role in injury prevention for volleyball players. However, manual video analysis of jump activities is time-intensive and costly, requiring significant effort and expensive hardware setups. The advent of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and machine learning algorithms offers a convenient and efficient alternative. Despite this, previous research has largely focused on either jump classification or physical load estimation, leaving a gap in integrated solutions. This study aims to present a pipeline to automatically detect jumps and predict heights using data from a waist-worn IMU. The pipeline leverages a Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network (MS-TCN) to detect jump segments in time-series data and classify the specific jump category. Subsequently, jump heights are estimated using three downstream regression machine learning models based on the identified segments. Our method is verified on a dataset comprising 10 players and 337 jumps. Compared to the result of VERT in height estimation (R-squared = -1.53), a commercial device commonly used in jump landing tasks, our method not only accurately identifies jump activities and their specific types (F1-score = 0.90) but also demonstrates superior performance in height prediction (R-squared = 0.53). This integrated solution offers a promising tool for monitoring physical load and mitigating injury risk in volleyball players.