Editorial for the special issue technology for disability sport

• Major sporting events, including the Olympic Games, areroutinely ‘‘brought to our homes’’ by modern mass media.The Paralympic Games follow the Olympic Games, and areanother major competition event. With each summer andwinter Paralympic games, such as the 2012 London and the2014 Sochi Paralympic games, the elite sporting achievementsmay be new to many of us. The athletic skill andpersistent determination drive Paralympic sports. A commonthread with the Paralympic athlete is the reliance onsome form of technology to compete on the world stage.Engineering and technology have become an essentialpart of modern-day sports. This partnership is necessary forcoach and athlete as they prepare for, and participate incompetitions. From the audience perspective, sports technologycan provide a new perspective and insight into thecompetition and its highlights. The quality of equipment,garments and footwear, and their interaction with athlete’sbody become an integrated part of the winning strategy inmodern sports.For the athlete with a disability, engineering and technologyhas always been an essential partnership. Withoutthe assistive devices, the disabled athlete is not able toprepare and participate in sport. Equipment design fordisabled athletes is often more complex and customizedthan for many other applications.The fundamental principles for the use of equipment inParalympic Sport are safety, fairness, universality andphysical prowess. While the safety criterion is relativelystraightforward, fulfilling other three can be challenging forthe designers and classifiers. It is often impossible to showif the performance of an athlete with a particular assistivedevice is determined by the athlete rather than by ‘‘theimpact of technology and equipment’’. By working togetherwith all parties the sports engineering community canprovide affordable safe and reliable assistive devices,technologies for training and rehabilitation, and animproved basis for objective classification.Research papers in this issue deal with a wide variety ofsubjects and are multidisciplinary. Four papers in thisspecial issue are related to the athlete and equipmentinteraction, which is important in all sports but needsspecial care and precision when working with of paraathletes.The remaining five papers are related to issuesimportant for the training and classification.We hope that these contributions will improve theintegration between athlete and equipment, will provide abetter basis for proper classification of the equipment andassistive devices, and, according to the International ParalympicCommittee vision, will ‘‘enable para-athletes toachieve sporting excellence and inspire and excite theworld’’.

Subject headings

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Hälsovetenskap -- Idrottsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Health Sciences -- Sport and Fitness Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

sports technology

disability sports

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)