Sports Biomechanics Research Group

As lead researcher on a study sponsored by TayCo, I set out to answer a question the company couldn't yet answer about its own product: could an ankle brace designed for rehabilitation be worn during athletic activity without compromising how someone moves? To find out, I built an end-to-end pipeline to capture and analyze how the brace changes a golfer's swing.

Using XSENS inertial motion-capture suits, I collected full-body kinematic data across four different brace positions and processed it in MATLAB and Excel — cleaning raw sensor signals, engineering comparable swing metrics, and testing whether the differences between conditions were meaningful rather than noise. By turning thousands of data points into a handful of clear, decision-ready findings, the study gave TayCo concrete evidence on whether its brace is viable beyond the clinic and could be positioned for everyday and athletic use.