Hello Everybody,
Things have been moving fast and I was very busy finishing up research methods and psychology of leadership. Both courses are complete and I now have more time to focus on my research project.
Since my last blog post I had a great conversations on the phone and on email with Dr. Colin Higgs. Dr. Higgs is one of the leading researchers in the para-sport world and did some amazing pioneer work in researching optimal racing chair design. We talked about some of the challenges and gaps that exist within Paralympic research. It was so interesting to hear about all the projects that Dr. Higgs was and still is involved in. He suggested to me to look at ideal tire pressure for racing wheelchairs. There has been research done on bicycles and every-day use wheelchairs but the fact that racing wheelchairs are propelled on a synthetic track changes the demands for tire pressure and it might be depending on weight and also the hardness of the track.
Dr. Higgs and I discussed the potential use of an accelerometer called raspberrypi. https://www.raspberrypi.org. This micro-processor that can act as a 3 axis accelerometer could detect acceleration and deceleration and give me data on the rolling friction on the racing chairs for different tire pressures. We also discussed the hypothesis of having different ideal tire pressures for different body weights. Instead of using the same athlete we could replace the subjects by sand bags and explore the relationship of different weights and tire pressures.
A study done by Barbosa et al. in 2019 looked at using a smart phone accelerometer app to collect acceleration and deceleration data for wheelchair racing. They concluded that the smart phone had a 16%-22% error margin and that the smart phone might not be a reliable instrument to assess wheelchair racing performance.
To be honest I’m a little bit intimated using a technology I have never used before. When I started this masters I did not think that I would be delving this much into using technology in order to collect the data. However this will be a great opportunity to learn more about accelerometers and data collection which is widely used in the field of exercise science and I’m looking forward to it.
Coach Ueli