Breathing Monitoring in Soccer: Part I-Validity of Commercial Wearable Sensors

Growing evidence suggests that respiratory frequency (f_R) is a valid marker of effort during high-intensity exercise, including sports of an intermittent nature, like soccer. However, very few attempts have been made so far to monitor f_R in soccer with unobtrusive devices. This study assessed the validity of three strain-based commercial wearable devices measuring f_R during soccer-specific movements. On two separate visits to the soccer pitch, 15 players performed a 30 min validation protocol wearing either a ComfTech^® (CT) vest or a Bioharness^TM (BH) 3.0 strap and a Tyme Wear^TM (TW) vest. f_R was extracted from the respiratory waveform of the three commercial devices with custom-made algorithms and compared with that recorded with a reference face mask. The f_R time course of the commercial devices generally resembled that of the reference system. The mean absolute percentage error was, on average, 7.03% for CT, 8.65% for TW, and 14.60% for BH for the breath-by-breath comparison and 1.85% for CT, 3.27% for TW, and 7.30% for BH when comparison with the reference system was made in 30 s windows. Despite the challenging measurement scenario, our findings show that some of the currently available wearable sensors are indeed suitable to unobtrusively measure f_R in soccer.