The use of artificial intelligence in the analysis of sports performance: A review of applications in human gait analysis and future directions for sports biomechanics

Computers have played an important supporting role in the development of experimental and theoretical sports biomechanics. The role of the computer now extends from data capture and data processing through to mathematical and statistical modelling and simulation and optimization. This paper seeks to demonstrate that elevation of the role of the computer to involvement in the decision-making process, through the use of artificial intelligence techniques, would be a potentially rewarding future direction for the discipline. In the absence of significant previous work in this area, this paper reviews experiences in a parallel field of medical informatics, namely gait analysis. Research into the application of expert systems and neural networks to gait analysis is reviewed, observations made and comparisons drawn with the biomechanical analysis of sports performance. Brief explanations of the artificial intelligence techniques discussed in the paper are provided. The paper concludes that the creation of an expert system for a specific well-defined sports technique would represent a significant advance in the development of sports biomechanics.