A Digital Solution to Surpass Incidents on 100m Sprint for Paralympic Visually Impaired Athletes

There is a great concern in the Paralympic field about the occurrence of incidents such as falls and disqualifications among other problems involving visually impaired athletes. The main goal of the study reported by this paper was to identify the incidents related to the orientation process based on the connection by a rope between an athlete and the respective guide on the 100m sprint for Paralympic visually impaired athletes. This allowed to elicit the requirements of a possible solution based on information technologies to optimize orientation in running tracks. To identify the type of incidents, 186 official championship videos of T11 to T13 sports’ classes of the 100m sprint races were analyzed, and all incidents were registered. The incidents were defined according to the International Paralympic Committee rules and include errors or fails, performance issues, unfinished races, and disqualifications. The results show that in almost half of the races there were incidents that affected the dynamics of the athlete-guide pair. Therefore, the results indicate difficulties in performing a synchronized and incidents free race using only one rope to guide the visually impaired athletes, and make it clear that they would benefit from a digital solution to improve their perception of what surrounds them, namely by providing information about the running tracks, routes and locations. These results could impact the Paralympic sport, namely by minimizing the interferences of the guides on the performance of the visually impaired athletes.