Wheels in motion: inertia sensing in roller derby

Abstract

The recent resurgence of Roller Derby has seen the game progress to an elite level with leagues becoming increasingly competitive and taking a more structured and athletic approach to training. Leagues that the authors are involved in have expressed a desire for an objective measure of basic skills and a way to monitor improvements in performance especially amongst junior skaters. This paper details the construction of an inertia-sensing platform designed to be safe to wear by skaters. We have identified a skating manoeuvre, the "crossover" that can be automatically detected using a simple filtering and thresholding procedure. We also report on some initial results in automatically detecting when a crossover occurs and provide details of our future work.