NIR tracking assists sports medicine in junior basketball training

Abstract

We recorded eye movements of eight elite junior basketball players. We hypothesized that a more stable gaze is correlated to a better shot rate. Upon preliminary testing we invited male juniors whose eyes could be reliably tracked in a game situation. To these ends, we used a head-mounted video-based eye tracker. The participants had no record of ocular or other health issues. No significant differences were found between shots made with and without the tracker cap, Paired samples t-test yielded p= .130 for the far and p=..900 > .050 for the middle range shots. The players made 40 shots from common far and middle range locations, 5 and 4 meters respectively for aged 14 years As expected, a statistical correlation was found between gaze fixation (in milliseconds) for the far and middle range shot rates, r=.782, p=.03. Notably, juniors who fixated longer before a shot had a more stable fixation or a lower gaze dispersion (in tracker's screen pixels), r=-.786, p=.02. This finding was augmented by the observation that the gaze dispersion while aiming at the basket was less (i.e., gaze more stable) in those who were more likely to score. We derived a regression equation linking fixation duration to shot success. We advocate infra-red eye tracking as a means to monitor player selection and training success.

Aiming for the quiet eye in biathlon

“…Eye tracking is an active multidisciplinary research field, which has shown great progress in the last decades in a range of domains including Medicine, Marketing, Psychology and Human factors [Duchowski 2007]. Several experiments have investigated performance of athletes by e.g., identifying differences between novices and experts or training novices based on knowledge of eye movements from experts [Afonso et al 2012;Hayhoe et al 2012;Huttermann et al 2013;Mann et al 2013;Paeglis et al 2011;Pires et al 2013;Pluijms et al 2015].…”