Breathing Monitoring in Soccer: Part I—Validity of Commercial Wearable Sensors
Lorenzo Innocenti,
Chiara Romano,
Giuseppe Greco,
Stefano Nuccio,
Alessio Bellini,
Federico Mari,
Sergio Silvestri,
Emiliano Schena,
Massimo Sacchetti,
Carlo Massaroni,
Andrea Nicolò
Affiliations
Lorenzo Innocenti
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Chiara Romano
Department of Engineering, Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128 Rome, Italy
Giuseppe Greco
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Stefano Nuccio
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Alessio Bellini
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Federico Mari
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Sergio Silvestri
Department of Engineering, Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128 Rome, Italy
Emiliano Schena
Department of Engineering, Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128 Rome, Italy
Massimo Sacchetti
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Carlo Massaroni
Department of Engineering, Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128 Rome, Italy
Andrea Nicolò
Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome “Foro Italico”, 00135 Rome, Italy
Growing evidence suggests that respiratory frequency (fR) is a valid marker of effort during high-intensity exercise, including sports of an intermittent nature, like soccer. However, very few attempts have been made so far to monitor fR in soccer with unobtrusive devices. This study assessed the validity of three strain-based commercial wearable devices measuring fR during soccer-specific movements. On two separate visits to the soccer pitch, 15 players performed a 30 min validation protocol wearing either a ComfTech® (CT) vest or a BioharnessTM (BH) 3.0 strap and a Tyme WearTM (TW) vest. fR was extracted from the respiratory waveform of the three commercial devices with custom-made algorithms and compared with that recorded with a reference face mask. The fR time course of the commercial devices generally resembled that of the reference system. The mean absolute percentage error was, on average, 7.03% for CT, 8.65% for TW, and 14.60% for BH for the breath-by-breath comparison and 1.85% for CT, 3.27% for TW, and 7.30% for BH when comparison with the reference system was made in 30 s windows. Despite the challenging measurement scenario, our findings show that some of the currently available wearable sensors are indeed suitable to unobtrusively measure fR in soccer.
