Use of Wearable Technology to Measure Emotional Responses Amongst Tennis Players

Competitive sports generate powerful emotional responses among both participants and spectators. It also has been proven that the emotions experienced by players prior to and during the sports can have a profound effect upon the quality of their performances, especially in competitive sports like tennis which has been described as an emotionally demanding game where emphasis is given on training of player’s mentality for their success. Successful measurement of emotions is a challenging task and there have been a very few research on measurement of emotions using technology in sports. This paper reports the use of two wearable technology, Apple Watch Series 2 and NeuroSky MindWave headset, in measuring emotional responses amongst tennis players. Experiments were conducted to measure the heart rates and EEG (electroencephalography) responses to categorise emotions and then to compare the results with the subjective ground truths scored by each participant. The results demonstrate statistically significant relationships between the objective and subjective measures of emotions indicating the use of wearable devices as a legitimate method of measuring emotional responses in a competitive sport like tennis.