BetterMinton Service: Analyzing the Badminton Service using Open Kinetic Chain

Abstract

We present a badminton training system that focuses on the backhand short service. Unlike the prior motor skill training systems which focus on the trainee’s posture, our system analyzes the process of moving joints with the open kinetic chain (OKC), which helps align movement and minimize muscle use for better joint control. We process the users’ mocap data to visually show their last service process comparing to 4 ideal OKC characteristics that we collected from a 6-sub-elite formative study as well as recommended contact posture. We validate our system through a 12-user study that measures serving accuracy, qualitative feedback, and skeletal data with users at various skill levels and open source our skeletal analysis model for future use. While the participants’ overall service accuracy was not significantly improved, our results show that our system helps participants in the short term to fine-tune their service motion closer to our ideal 4 OKC characteristics.