Aerial adventure attractions are intended to produce exhilarating sensations at significant elevation, speed, and acceleration, all while maintaining the safety of the participant. While zipline designers and owners can refer to international standards addressing many safety requirements, the measurement and assessment of acceleration exposures of the zipline rider has not been standardized. This paper considers the design and validation protocol for wearable sensor technology to collect acceleration and g-force exposure of a zipline rider.
Introducing the combination of systematic design and quantitative analysis to wearable technology architectures requires considerable thought taking into account existing ride standards, biomechanics, ergonomics and the need for data accuracy. We first evaluate our state of knowledge and determine where there are gaps in safety standards. We then determine a design requirement outline for measuring acceleration utilizing wearable architecture. With the combination of complex processing requirements, the necessity of placing sensors and input/output modules at different locations on the rider’s body, and stringent limits on size, weight, and sensor signal, the design of such systems is an inherently challenging problem. We contribute a test protocol that will evaluate the reliability and validity of the proposed system.