— Biomechanics · Computer Vision · Modeling —

For my undergraduate thesis, I investigated how body positioning affects the forces required during rock climbing. I filmed climbers completing routes in an indoor climbing gym and used MediaPipe Pose Landmark Detection to extract key body positions during advancing movements. I then developed a 2D static equilibrium model to estimate the forces at each limb in contact with the wall and analyze how changes in a climber’s center of mass affected the required arm forces. Using this model, I explored body positions that could reduce upper-body loading and investigated the relationship between estimated arm force and route difficulty. The results demonstrated how motion analysis and biomechanical modeling can be used to quantitatively evaluate climbing technique.