Validity, reliability and accuracy of inertial measurement units (IMUs) to measure angles: application in swimming.

Abstract

The first objective was to test the validity, reliability and accuracy of paired inertial measurement units (IMUs) to assess absolute angles relative to Vicon and OptiTrack systems. The potential impacts of slow vs. rapid and intermittent vs. continuous movements were tested during 2D laboratory analyses and 3D ecological context analysis. The second objective was to test the IMUs alone in an ecological activity (i.e., front crawl) that encompassed the previous independent variables to quantify inter-cyclic variability. Slow and intermittent motion ensured high to reasonable validity, reliability and accuracy. Rapid motion revealed an out-of-phase pattern for temporal reliability and lower validity, which was also visible in 3D. Also, spatial reliability and accuracy decreased in 3D, mainly due to discrepancies in local maximums, whereas temporal reliability remained in-phase. For the second objective, inter-cyclic variability did not exceed 12° based on root mean square error (RMSE). Therefore, IMUs should be considered valuable supplements to optoelectronic systems if users carefully position the sensors in rigid clusters and calibrate them to integrate potential offsets. Drift correction by spline interpolation or normalisation of the absolute data should also be considered as additional techniques that increase IMU performance in ecological contexts of performance.