WIMU instrumentation of assassin trainer & skeleton sled
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Date
2012-07
Authors
Gaffney, Mark
Colyer, Steffi
Walsh, Michael
Drawer, Scott
Salo, Aki
O'Flynn, Brendan
Ó Mathúna, S. Cian
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Published Version
Abstract
Skeleton is a high‐speed Winter Olympic sport performed on the same twisting, downhill ice tracks used for Bobsleigh & Luge. The single rider sprints and pushes their sled for 20‐30m on a level start section before loading and going through a twisting course of over 1km, at speeds up to 140km/h, experiencing up to 5g. In competition, the top athletes can be within a fraction of a second of each other. The initial short pushing period is believed to be critical to overall performance but it is not well understood. A collaborative project between University of Bath, UK Sport and Tyndall National Institute is instrumenting skeleton athletes, training equipment and test tracks with Tyndall’s Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit technology in order to investigate and improve understanding of this phase of a skeleton run. It is hoped this will lead to improved training regimes and better performance of such elite, Olympic level athletes. This work presents an initial look at the system as implemented and data recorded.
Description
Keywords
Wireless inertial measurement unit (WIMU) , Skeleton
Citation
GAFFNEY, M., COLYER, S., WALSH, M., DRAWER, S., SALO, A., O’FLYNN, B. & Ó MATHÚNA, S. C. 2012. WIMU instrumentation of skeleton "ASSASSIN" trainer and sled. In: "Engineering of Sports 9: ISEA's 9th International Sports Engineering Conference". Lowell, Massachusetts, United States. 9-13 July 2012.