System for Performance Assessment of K2 Crews in Flatwater Sprint Kayak

The performance of a flat-water sprint kayak crew does not depend only on the skills of each member but, as it occurs in all team sports, also on the efficiency of the interaction among the members. Particularly important is the synchronization of the athletes, which is currently evaluated using video analysis with its well-known limitations in terms of occlusions, time resolution, and computation time. This study presents a new software that, making use of the dynamic and kinematic data acquired from the E-kayak systems, computes two numerical parameters to assess the efficiency of a K2 crew. These parameters can give coaches immediate feedback on the quality of the interaction among the members of a crew.