Discussion on the Practical Role of Wearable Devices in Human Body Tracking, Enhancement of Exercise Efficiency, and Protection against Sports Injuries

Abstract

Wearable devices have evolved from simple step counters to multi-sensor monitoring systems. The world's market for wearable technology will be about 86.78 billion US dollars by 2025. The amount of money for the market of smart sports wearable devices in China has risen from 2.165 billion yuan in 2019 to 5.447 billion yuan in 2024. Human motion tracking, improvement of exercise efficiency and sports injury prevention are the contents of this paper; at the same time, it studies the application value of wearable devices in sports training. The Inertial Measurement Unit estimates gait parameters that are highly consistent with laboratory equipment; the correlation coefficient for joint angle prediction is between 0.93 and 0.99, and the average absolute percentage error of heart rate monitoring by smartwatches is less than the 10% validity threshold; the machine learning model based on wearable sensor data predicts the risk of subacromial impingement syndrome with an accuracy of 85% to 88%. The energy-consumption estimates for most of the devices are not in line with the gold standard. Collect the relevant empirical data, determine the technical limits of all types of devices, and provide a reference for selecting wearable devices in sports training.