Mental fatigue has a potential negative impact on athletes' technical skill stability, yet quantitative assessment and mechanism analysis in youth football contexts remain insufficient. This study aims to establish a multimodal monitoring framework based on inertial measurement units (IMUs) to uncover dynamic variation patterns in sport-specific technical skill stability among youth football players under mental fatigue. Twenty-eight elite male youth players from professional academies (aged 15.8±1.3 years) underwent standardized cognitive loading tasks to induce mental fatigue. A distributed IMU sensing system (7-node configuration, 200Hz sampling rate) synchronously captured 17 kinematic parameters across three core technical skills (dribbling, passing, shooting), integrated with heart rate variability (HRV) and environmental perception data to construct a multimodal dataset. Nonlinear time-series analysis and multiscale feature extraction methods were employed to examine motion stability degeneration patterns under fatigue conditions. The findings revealed significant differential degradation in ankle joint stability (p < 0.01) and trunk rotation control (p < 0.05) during dribbling and shooting execution under induced mental fatigue. Biomechanical energy transfer efficiency decreased by 18.7-22.3% across technical skills, while environmental awareness response latency increased 23.5% (p=0.012). This study proposes a technical stability fluctuation index (TSFI) integrating key temporal-spatial parameters, demonstrating a strong negative correlation (r=-0.82) with mental fatigue levels. The IMU-based framework achieves 91.4% accuracy in real-time fatigue monitoring through machine learning validation, providing novel quantitative methods for assessing and intervening in cognitive-sportmotor integration in youth football training.
Enxu Wang (Thu,) studied this question.