Lowering Detection in Sport Climbing Based on Orientation of the Sensor Enhanced Quickdraw

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-power sensor-based system embedded in climbing equipment to detect climbers' lowering, enhancing activity tracking in gyms while preserving privacy and reducing costs.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware prototype with energy-efficient sensors and a supervised method to accurately identify lowering events in sport climbing.

Findings

Sensors' orientation patterns vary during lowering

Supervised approach achieves high detection accuracy

Energy-efficient sensors are practical for gym deployment

Abstract

Tracking climbers' activity to improve services and make the best use of their infrastructure is a concern for climbing gyms. Each climbing session must be analyzed from beginning till lowering of the climber. Therefore, spotting the climbers descending is crucial since it indicates when the ascent has come to an end. This problem must be addressed while preserving privacy and convenience of the climbers and the costs of the gyms. To this aim, a hardware prototype is developed to collect data using accelerometer sensors attached to a piece of climbing equipment mounted on the wall, called quickdraw, that connects the climbing rope to the bolt anchors. The corresponding sensors are configured to be energy-efficient, hence become practical in terms of expenses and time consumption for replacement when using in large quantity in a climbing gym. This paper describes hardware specifications, studies data measured by the sensors in ultra-low power mode, detect sensors' orientation patterns during lowering different routes, and develop an supervised approach to identify lowering.