Background Research on change of direction movement (COD) has focused on factors related to performance and injury prevention or rehabilitation. Wearable devices are used to evaluate accelerations and angles during COD movement, but so far there are no clear recommendations on specific metrics to be used.

Objective To evaluate the reliability and validity of inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors to detect COD movement and aspects related to COD movement. To summarize the available evidence on how wearable IMUs are used to analyze COD movement in sports and exercise.

Design Scoping review. A systematic search was employed in MEDLINE (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCO host), SPORTDiscus (EBSCO host), EMBASE and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. A grey literature search was employed to locate non-peer reviewed studies. The risk of bias of the studies evaluating validity and/or reliability was evaluated using the AXIS tool.

Setting Sport and exercise.

Participants Studies on sports related COD movements measured with IMUs.

Main Outcome Measurements Methodological quality of included studies on validity and reliability.

Results After screening 11,376 articles 47 studies remained, with eleven studies evaluating validity and/or reliability. Most of the studies were conducted with preplanned movements in the laboratory setting and participants were usually adult males. Varying sensor locations limits the ability to generalize these findings.

Conclusions There are promising results on validity and reliability of analysis of COD movement with IMUs, but the number of studies is small and the quality of the studies is limited. Studies using IMUs to evaluate COD movement can be improved with larger sample sizes and agreement on the metrics used and sensor placement. Future research should include on-field studies, where movements are unplanned and factors like speed and how opponent players affect the movements are included in analyses.