Currently submitted to: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Sep 18, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 22, 2026 - Nov 17, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Markerless tracking systems applied to ball kicking kinematics assessment in football codes: protocol for a systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Markerless systems based on pose estimation algorithms emerged as one promising solution to tracking human movements under real-world conditions. Despite their advantages over traditional marker-based systems (e.g., lower invasiveness, processing time, and cost), previous systematic reviews have not yet examined the measurement properties and feasibility of markerless tracking systems for ball-kicking assessments.
Objective:
This study aimed to provide a protocol for a systematic review of evidence from scientific studies that evaluated ball kicking across football codes using markerless, camera-based tracking systems.
Methods:
The proposed protocol follows the PRISMA-P checklist and was preregistered in the Open Science Framework platform prior to run the electronic searches. A Boolean search strategy will be adopted including terms related to the research question population (Football, Soccer, Rugby, Futsal), exposure (markerless, marker-less, dynamic movement capture, body scan, pose estimation, kinect, deeplabcut, openpose, MediaPipe, alphapose, Theia3D, neural network) and outcomes (kick, shoot, shot, pass, punt, ball handling, ball-kicking, goal-directed, skill, technical). Five databases will be used for the searches (PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore and EBSCO). The risk of bias of resulting pertinent literature will be assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Checklist for Analytical Cross-Sectional Studies. Qualitative/descriptive synthesis in addition to evidence gap maps and best evidence synthesis is planned to synthesize included studies.
Results:
From an initial pilot search conducted on August, 2026, we found that some comprehensive literature reviews (N = 16) addressed ball kicking movement/kinematics (37% narrative, 44% systematic and 19% with meta-analysis), whereas none of these previous review studies examined solely the application of markerless tracking systems in understanding ball kicking kinematics.
Conclusions:
The present study provides preliminary results, rationale and a protocol for performing a systematic summary of the highest level of evidence available from scientific studies that adopted markerless tracking systems to assess ball kicking kinematics across football codes. Clinical Trial: OSF Open Science Framework - Aug 31, 2026 - under Registration ID #jm9vw; URL: osf.io/jm9vw
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