Design and Analysis of Electronic Wearables for Taekwondo Sports

Taekwondo is a combat sport that is based on striking and involves full body contact. Initially, it a referee-exclusive sport and that led to increased controversy on referee/judges’ accuracy, bias and fairness. To address these concerns, point scoring systems (PSS) were introduced in 2012 only consisting of a chest protector and in 2016 head protectors were added. Constant improvements have been made on these PSS and new impact classification algorithms and hardware were developed for a system made by 20/20 Armor. The work achieved 90% accuracy for illegal vs legal classification on the head protector and 94.4% accuracy between legal impacts to the chest protector. This work proved to be a great step forward since reliance is increasing on these PSS as they are now the “final decision” for impact detection in Taekwondo. Furthermore, our algorithms use edge computing that allow for real time application and at-home training.