German Measurement Expert Meeting 2012 Hannover

Following an invitation, I did attend the annual meeting of german experts in rowing performance measurment in Hannover yesterday. I was able to give a short overview of RowMotion, my roadmap and received a ton of valuable feedback. Most importantly, it was recommended that a validation of RowMotions measurement be made against a reference System that has been proven to yield correct results in a Lab environment. This is something I had initially planned to do this weekend, however the water conditions (ice) will postpone this into early march. I am confident we will see some interesting results out of this. You can get the slides I did present here:  2012-02-16-Hannover-RowMotion

A range of innovations for professional hardware based systems has been presented.

The German FES institute presented their newly developed sensors for measuring footstretcher force and blade force plus integration into their MMS 2012 System. They did also conduct a study of vertical boat translation (“lift”) vs.  the yaw angle and showed simulations that conclude the former has a much larger impact on boat velocity. They used two X-Sens sensors mounted at the bow and stern respectively and compared their findings with a commercial inertial navigation system.

Prof. Dr. Klaus Mattes and Dr. Nina Schaffert did present promising study results from the Sonification project Sofirow (a system based on their Accrow measurement system). The study showed that Sonification had a significant impact on boat velocity during a single training session. They are currently researching if those short term improvements translate into long term, structural changes in boat acceleration.