Marko Kos

By Marko Kos and Iztok Kramberger

For monitoring the progress of athletes in various sports and disciplines, several different approaches are nowadays available. Recently, miniature wearables have gained popularity for this task due to being lightweight and typically cheaper than other approaches. They can be positioned on the athlete’s body, or in some cases, the devices are incorporated into sports requisites, like tennis racquet handles, balls, baseball bats, gloves, etc. Their purpose is to monitor the performance of an athlete by gathering essential information during match or training. In this chapter, the focus will be on the different possibilities of tennis game monitoring analysis. A miniature wearable device, which is worn on a player’s wrist during the activity, is going to be presented and described. The smart wearable device monitors athletes’ arm movements with sampling the output of the 6 DOF IMU. Parallel to that, it also gathers biometric information like pulse rate and skin temperature. All the collected information is stored locally on the device during the sports activity. Later, it can be downloaded to a PC and transferred to a cloud-based service, where visualization of the recorded data and more detailed game/training statistics can be performed.

Part of the book: Sports Science and Human Health

By Damjan Vlaj, Andrej Žgank and Marko Kos

The performance of applications based on natural language processing depends primarily on the environment in which these applications are applied. Intelligent environments will be one of the major applications used to process natural language. The methods for speaker’s gender classification can adapt and improve the performance of natural language processing applications. That is why, this chapter will present an effective speaker’s pitch value detection in noisy environments, which then allows more robust speaker’s gender classification. The chapter presents the algorithm for the speaker’s pitch value detection and performs the comparison in various noisy environments. The experiments are carried out on the part of the publically available Aurora 2 speech database. The results showed that the automatically determined pitch values deviate, on average, only by 8.39 Hz from the reference pitch value. A well-defined pitch value allows a functional speaker’s gender classification. In this chapter, presented speaker’s gender classification works well, even at low signal to noise ratios. The experiments show that the speaker’s gender classification performance at SNR 0 dB is higher than 91% when the automatically determined pitch value is used. Speaker’s gender classification can then be used further in the processes of natural language processing.

Part of the book: Recent Trends in Computational Intelligence