A welcome advancement to enhance performance and rehabilitation as baseball season heats up.

The proposed fabric-sensing system is a flexible, motion-capture textile that monitors joint rotation. The wearable is lightweight, low-cost, washable and comfortable, making it ideal for participants of all levels of sport or patients recuperating from injuries.

The study, published in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, will be presented later this year at the UbiComp 2019 conference in London in September.

«We wear fabrics all the time, so they provide the perfect medium for continuous sensing,» said Xia Zhou, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth. «This study demonstrates the high level of performance and precision that can be acquired through basic, off-the-shelf fabrics.»

Accurate monitoring of joint movement is critical for performance coaching and physical therapy. For athletes where arm angle is important — anyone from baseball pitchers to tennis players — long-term sensing can help instructors analyze motion and provide coaching corrections. For injured athletes, or other physical therapy patients, such monitoring can help doctors assess the effectiveness of medical and physical treatments.

In order to be effective to a wide-range of wearers, monitors need to be portable, comfortable, and capable of sensing subtle motion to achieve a high-level of precision.

Story Source: Materials provided by Dartmouth College. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.