Abstract
Sports climbing has grown as a competitive sport over the last decades. This has leading to an increasing interest in guaranteeing the safety of the climber. In particular, operational errors, caused by the belayer, are one of the major issues leading to severe injuries. The objective of this study is to analyze and predict the severity of a pendulum fall based on the movement information from the belayer alone. Therefore, the impact force served as a reference. It was extracted using an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on the climber. Additionally, another IMU was attached to the belayer, from which several hand-crafted features were explored. As this led to a high dimensional feature space, dimension reduction techniques were required to improve the performance. We were able to predict the impact force with a median error of about 4.96%. Pre-defined windows as well as the applied feature dimension reduction techniques allowed for a meaningful interpretation of the results. The belayer was able to reduce the impact force, which is acting onto the climber, by over 30%. So, a monitoring system in a training center could improve the skills of a belayer and hence alleviate the severity of the injuries.
Highlights
IntroductionSchöffl et al [3], for example performed a study analyzing the type and cause of the incident in one specific indoor climbing gym over the span of five years
In combination with a Shapiro-Wilk test, which showed that both classes follow a Gaussian distribution, the evidence speaks against the null hypothesis whilst using a threshold of α = 0.05
Utilizing the estimation of the impact force throughout a fall in a training environment could improve the quality of a belayer
Summary
Schöffl et al [3], for example performed a study analyzing the type and cause of the incident in one specific indoor climbing gym over the span of five years. They found out that in about 33% of the cases, a mistake was made while belaying. Studies involving fall situations were performed by Bonfitto et al [11] and Tonoli et al [12] For this task, they integrated an accelerometer into the harness of the climber.
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