Abstract
The disabled sports get a great deal of attention. In fact, almost 40 million people watched the London Paralympic games on TV. Among them, the wheelchair racing has been popular after the first international wheelchair sporting competition for the disabled in 1952 and Japan got a lot of medals in the wheelchair racing. Due to advanced wheelchair quality and technology of analyzing kinematics, the results of record have improved. Previous studies considered the force on a hand rim and the characteristics of strokes. However these studies were confined to consider the driving force and the motion individually. One of the reason is that no measurement instrument of the driving force for a racing wheelchair was developed. Then this study developed the sensor wheel for a racing wheelchair to measure the two-force components on a hand rim plane. The experiment to measure the driving force and the motion at the same time was conducted at wind tunnel facility of JISS (Japan Institute of sports sciences) with the sensor wheel, 7 motion capture cameras and a roller system. The subjects were 3 proficient athletes, two of them have played as Japanese national members. They were asked to play the cruising and acceleration phase. In conclusion, the present study has demonstrated that the driving force could be measured with the sensor wheel and we could discovery the differences of strokes. Further study is needed in order to analyze the characteristic of strokes and indicate the relationship of each parameter in detail.
