The standard technology used to capture motion for biomechanical analysis in sports has employed marker-based optical systems. While these systems are excellent at providing positional information, they suffer from a limited ability to accurately provide fundamental quantities such as velocity and acceleration (hence forces and torques) during high-speed motion typical of many sports. Conventional optical systems require considerable setup time, can exhibit sensitivity to extraneous light, and generally sample too slowly to accurately capture extreme bursts of athletic activity. In recent years, wireless wearable sensors have begun to penetrate devices used in sports performance assessment, offering potential solutions to these limitations. This article, after determining pressing problems in sports that such sensors could solve and surveying the state-of-the-art in wearable motion capture for sports, presents a wearable dual-range inertial and magnetic sensor platform that we developed to enable an end-to-end investigation of high-level, very wide dynamic-range biomechanical parameters. We tested our system on collegiate and elite baseball pitchers, and have derived and measured metrics to glean insight into performance-relevant motion. As this was, we believe, the first ultra-wide-range wireless multipoint and multimodal inertial and magnetic sensor array to be used on elite baseball pitchers, we trace its development, present some of our results, and discuss limitations in accuracy from factors such as soft-tissue artifacts encountered with extreme motion. In addition, we discuss new metric opportunities brought by our systems that may be relevant for the assessment of micro-trauma in baseball.

Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) are musical instruments typically composed of a control surface where user interaction is measured by sensors whose values are mapped to sound synthesis algorithms. These instruments have gained interest among skilled musicians and performers in the last decades leading to artistic practices including musical performance, interactive installations and dance. The creation of DMIs typically involves several areas, among them: arts, design and engineering. The balance between these areas is an essential task in DMI design so that the resulting instruments are aesthetically appealing, robust, and allow responsive, accurate and repeatable sensing. In this paper, we review the use of sensors in the DMI community as manifested in the proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2009–2013). Focusing on the sensor technologies and signal conditioning techniques used by the NIME community. Although it has been claimed that specifications for artistic tools are harder than those for military applications, this study raises a paradox showing that in most of the cases, DMIs are based on a few basic sensors types and unsophisticated engineering solutions, not taking advantage of more advanced sensing, instrumentation and signal processing techniques that could dramatically improve their response. We aim to raise awareness of limitations of any engineering solution and to assert the benefits of advanced electronics instrumentation design in DMIs. For this, we propose the use of specialized sensors such as strain gages, advanced conditioning circuits and signal processing tools such as sensor fusion. We believe that careful electronic instrumentation design may lead to more responsive instruments.