On-water measurement and analysis system for estimating kayak paddlers´ performance

In recent years, the use of computerized measurement systems to help coaching professional kayak paddlers has become rather common. Note that it is not possible to evaluate the quality of the paddling exactly, however the measured inertial signals can provide useful quantitative information. Therefore, it is a challenge to find really good indicators that could help the trainers. Keeping these in mind we have developed a microcontroller-based expandable system that can record the kayak´s motion accurately using the built-in 3-axis accelerometers, gyroscopes and various optional sensors. Several hours of paddling can be recorded and the off-line analysis can be done using a PC. After examining many athletes with different age and technical skills at training and races, we have evaluated the commonly used indicators and defined useful additional indicators based on the statistics and fluctuations of the parameters obtained with peak search algorithms and frequency-domain analysis..