Learning golf swing signatures from a single wrist-worn inertial sensor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive, data-driven system for analyzing golf swings using a single wrist-worn inertial sensor, enabling detailed, personalized, and explainable motion analysis in real-world settings.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that reconstructs full-body kinematics and identifies swing phases from wrist data, including a large dataset, synthetic training data, and interpretable motion primitives.

Findings

Accurately estimates full-body kinematics and swing events from wrist data.

Detects technical flaws and individual movement signatures.

Tracks technical progress over time, correlating with improved performance.

Abstract

Despite its importance for performance and injury prevention, golf swing analysis is limited by isolated metrics, underrepresentation of professional athletes, and a lack of rich, interpretable movement representations. We address these gaps with a holistic, data-driven framework for personalized golf swing analysis from a single wrist-worn sensor. We build a large dataset of professional swings from publicly available videos, reconstruct full-body 3D kinematics using biologically accurate human mesh recovery, and generate synthetic inertial data to train neural networks that infer motion and segment swing phases from wrist-based input. We learn a compositional, discrete vocabulary of motion primitives that facilitates the detection and visualization of technical flaws, and is expressive enough to predict player identity, club type, sex, and age. Our system accurately estimates full-body kinematics and swing events from wrist data, delivering lab-grade motion analysis on-course and supporting early detection of anomalous movement patterns. Explainability methods reveal subtle, individualized movement signatures, reinforcing the view that variability is a hallmark of skilled performance. Longitudinal tracking demonstrates practical value: as one player's handicap improved from 50 to 2.2 over 1.5 years, our system captured measurable technical progress and provided targeted, actionable feedback. Our findings challenge common assumptions, such as swing consistency across clubs and the existence of a single "ideal" swing, and uncover latent biomarkers shaped by both intrinsic traits and task-specific constraints. This work bridges lab and field-based biomechanics, offering scalable, accessible, high-fidelity motion analysis for research, coaching, and injury prevention, while opening new directions in movement-based phenotyping, personalized equipment design, and motor skill development.