The 13th Conference of the International Sports Engineering Association (ISEA 2020) ^†

Every second year, the International Sports Engineering Association (ISEA) conducts a conference somewhere around the world. In 2020, the conference was initially planned to be held in Tokyo, Japan. However, at the beginning of 2020, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 emerged all over the world. To secure the health and safety of the participants, the conference style was changed into an online one. However, following the ISEA2018 meeting in Brisbane, Australia, there is no doubt that a two-year period has resulted in remarkable changes in sporting research and technology. The 2020 online meeting brought together over 1000 participants, including world-leading experts in the field of sports engineering, to present their latest research results and to exchange ideas about the latest research and technologies.

Sports engineering is a relatively new engineering discipline, combining the fields of mechanical engineering, electronic and communications engineering, computational modelling and data analytics, as well as biomechanics and sensors.

The 2020 conference had keynote speakers in the fields of musculoskeletal modeling, fluid dynamics of sports equipment, impact analysis of sports equipment, development of automatic gymnastics skill recognition systems, and development of commercial sports equipment and garments. This collection of more than 160 papers has been extensively reviewed by world leaders in the technology, revised, and then re-reviewed to ensure compliance and excellence. They have been categorized into specific sport- and research-oriented disciplines, although many papers straddle these boundaries.

As editors of this volume, we are delighted to present the conference outcomes, to acknowledge the many paper reviewers from around the world, and to thank the conference participants for creating such an exciting and cooperative environment to share this new knowledge. We believe that any virus cannot prevent scientific activity by humanity.