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The assessment of running kinematics is essential for injury prevention and rehabilitation, including anterior cruciate ligament sprains. Recent advances in computer vision have enabled the development of tools for quantifying kinematics in research and clinical settings. This study evaluated the accuracy of an OpenPifPaf-based markerless method for assessing sagittal plane kinematics of the ankle, knee, and hip during treadmill running using smartphone video footage and examined the impact of clothing on the results. Thirty healthy participants ran at 2.5 and 3.6 m/s under two conditions: (1) wearing minimal clothing with markers to record kinematics by using both a smartphone and a marker-based system, and (2) wearing usual running clothes and recording kinematics by only using a smartphone. Joint angles, averaged over 20 cycles, were analysed using SPM1D and RMSE. The markerless method produced kinematic waveforms closely matching the marker-based results, with RMSEs of 5.6° (hip), 3.5° (ankle), and 2.9° (knee), despite some significant differences identified by SPM1D. Clothing had minimal impact, with RMSEs under 2.8° for all joints. These findings highlight the potential of the OpenPifPaf-based markerless method as an accessible, simple, and reliable tool for assessing running kinematics, even in natural attire, for research and clinical applications.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s25030934 | DOI Listing |
Behav Res Methods
September 2025
Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Cybernetics, Prague, Czech Republic.
Automatic markerless estimation of infant posture and motion from ordinary videos carries great potential for movement studies "in the wild", facilitating understanding of motor development and massively increasing the chances of early diagnosis of disorders. There has been a rapid development of human pose estimation methods in computer vision, thanks to advances in deep learning and machine learning. However, these methods are trained on datasets that feature adults in different contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Behav Neurosci
August 2025
Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Inha University Hospitals, Incheon, Republic of Korea.
Recent breakthroughs in marker-less pose-estimation have driven a significant transformation in computer-vision approaches. Despite the emergence of state-of-the-art keypoint-detection algorithms, the extent to which these tools are employed and the nature of their application in scientific research has yet to be systematically documented. We systematically reviewed the literature to assess how pose-estimation techniques are currently applied in rodent (rat and mouse) models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt Biomech
December 2025
School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.
This study evaluates the accuracy of single camera markerless motion capture (SCMoCap) using Microsoft's Azure Kinect, enhanced with inverse kinematics (IK) via OpenSim, for upper limb movement analysis. Twelve healthy adults performed ten upper-limb tasks, recorded simultaneously by OptiTrack (marker-based) and Azure Kinect (markerless) from frontal and sagittal views. Joint angles were calculated using two methods: (1) direct kinematics based on body coordinate frames and (2) inverse kinematics using OpenSim's IK tool with anatomical keypoints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Sports Sci
September 2025
Department for Health, University of Bath, Bath, UK.
This study evaluated the agreement between markerless motion capture and criterion methods for estimating mechanical work (external and internal) performed during tennis strokes. Sixteen tennis players performed 10 serve, forehand and backhand movements whilst motion data were captured concurrently with a custom 3D markerless system (utilising open-source pose estimation; HRNet and OpenPose) and two criterion methods: marker-based motion capture and ground reaction forces. Centre of mass kinetic and potential energy were calculated and used to compute external mechanical work from all methods, whilst segment kinetic energies were calculated and used to compute internal mechanical work from the kinematic approaches only.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioengineering (Basel)
August 2025
Higher Institute of Sport and Physical Education of Ksar-Said, University of Manouba, Manouba 2010, Tunisia.
This scoping review examines the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in sports biomechanics, with a focus on enhancing performance and preventing injuries. The review addresses key research questions, including primary AI methods, their effectiveness in improving athletic performance, their potential for injury prediction, sport-specific applications, strategies for translating knowledge, ethical considerations, and remaining research gaps. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, a comprehensive literature search was conducted across five databases (PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and SPORTDiscus), encompassing studies published between January 2015 and December 2024.
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