Automatic rock climbing route inference using wearables
Avinash Kalyanaraman, Juhi Ranjan, Kamin Whitehouse · 2015
Rock climbing is a relatively new, but highly popular sport. In the current state of the art, there is no technology that can record climbing routes and statistics about a climber's exercises. Taking photographs of routes is the state of art method of sharing descriptions of climbing routes with other climbing enthusiasts. We propose to automatically track climbing routes using wearable devices placed on the hands and feet of a climber. Each wearable device has an IMU sensor and a barometer on it. In addition, the devices on the hands have EMG sensors on them. The combination of these sensors can detect when a person makes contact with a hold, and the relative position of the hold contacted with respect to the current hold, and the type of hold. A map of the route, including annotations of the hand hold and foot holds used by the climber, can be inferred by performing dead reckoning based navigation for each of the devices.