Authors:

Tom Long Huynh

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About Paper:

Elite springboard and platform divers are at high risk for wrist overuse injuries due to repetitive, high-velocity impacts and frequent joint hyperextension upon water entry. Current injury prevention strategies rely heavily on subjective pain reports and coach intuition. This lack of objective biomechanical data leaves divers vulnerable to progressively worsening asymptomatic injuries and severe, repetitive strain injuries. We are developing a wearable, wrist-worn smart sensor to measure and quantify individual impact decelerations and wrist extension angles upon water entry, providing easily interpretable data for coaches and athletes to inform training decisions with empirical evidence. The minimum viable prototype (MVPr) comprises a wrist-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) using the MPU6050 sensor and Arduino microcontroller. Preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of detecting real-time wrist extension angles and impact decelerations in a diving context. Following MVPr testing and refinement, we will integrate support circuitry, telemetry, and miniaturize the system onto a flexible, printed circuit board with a form factor similar to an epidermal patch. This second iteration will monitor trends across training sessions and alert coaches and athletes to high-risk behavior via Bluetooth. Once validated against optical motion capture, data will be collected from elite divers, and a machine learning algorithm will be trained to detect and predict movement patterns associated with overuse injury risk. This research addresses the challenges of capturing objective diving performance metrics by engineering a wearable IMU that does not disrupt any aspect of the diver's performance while providing critical data to inform training protocols and identify injury risk. Keywords: Overuse Injury; Injury Mitigation; Olympic Diving; Wearable Sensor; Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Tom Long Huynh