ClimbAX: Skill assessment for climbing enthusiasts

Abstract

In recent years the sport of climbing has seen consistent increase in popularity. Climbing requires a complex skill set for successful and safe exercising. While elite climbers receive intensive expert coaching to refine this skill set, this progression approach is not viable for the amateur population. We have developed ClimbAX - a climbing performance analysis system that aims for replicating expert assessments and thus represents a first step towards an automatic coaching system for climbing enthusiasts. Through an accelerometer based wearable sensing platform, climber's movements are captured. An automatic analysis procedure detects climbing sessions and moves, which form the basis for subsequent performance assessment. The assessment parameters are derived from sports science literature and include: power, control, stability, speed. ClimbAX was evaluated in a large case study with 53 climbers under competition settings. We report a strong correlation between predicted scores and official competition results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatic skill assessment system.