A New 3D Motion and Force Measurement System for Sport Climbing

Sport climbing is a form of rock climbing and has currently increased in popularity. This kind of climbing is played all over the world and becomes an Olympic sport. Motion measurement and analysis system have been required to improve the performance of climbers and instruct them properly. Several systems using motion capture have been proposed to analyze the movement of climbers so far. However, the conventional systems are not sufficient to describe climbing motions since the forces on holds have not been taken into account. This paper proposes a new 3D motion and force measurement system for sport climbing that can obtain the information on human motion and forces on holds simultaneously. The motion and force data are synchronized. Then, we can measure and analyze climbing motions geometrically and dynamically by using the proposed system. The performance of the proposed system is qualitatively verified by experiments.