Like many sports that are reaching a more professional status, there is a growing demand to use performance diagnostics in sport climbing. The favored outcome is feedback about the achieved performance of the athlete. Furthermore, it should help to make these performances measurable and comparable. This can be achieved by measuring the force of all extremities to the climbing wall.

For this measuring setup several 3-DOF force sensors are being used. Commercial force sensors are rather expensive and are therefore not (or hardly) affordable for sport unions. The intention of this Bachelor's thesis is finding a concept, which complies with the specifications, framed with the youth coordinator in the Austrian national climbing team.

The core concept of this thesis is about force measurement which utilizes the piezoelectric effect. All manufactured parts have been constructed to mill them in one or two clamping processes and therefore make the production as economical as possible.
  Usually piezoelectric sensors are only used for dynamic force measurement. To enable quasi-static measurements up to a measurement time of 10 s the correspondent charging amplifier is mentioned as well. Moreover the method of improving the accurateness by digital post-editing will be analysed.

Keywords: force sensor, multiaxial, performance diagnostics

August 29, 2013