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When Paralympic wheelchair track athletes roll across the finish line, a tenth or a hundredth of a second can make a big difference.

That’s why some U.S. athletes have turned to a Chicago-based startup to help shave off a little more time at the competition, which starts Wednesday.

Rithmio, which was founded at the University of Illinois, offers motion recognition software to help companies build wearables and connected clothing. The startup also offers an app that helps weightlifters automatically track their workouts.

Now, the company is using its technology to give Paralympic track athletes better data into the movements they use to propel their wheelchairs.

In July, the startup began working with Adam Bleakney, a U.S. Paralympic wheelchair track coach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bleakney has been training 12 wheelchair track athletes competing in Rio over the next two weeks. The athletes have been using Rithmio’s “Cadence Counter” to track their stroke cadence before they headed to the Paralympics.

Under Bleakney’s direction, athletes typically train between 10 and 20 hours across six days a week, 49 weeks out of the year. But he said he’s always looking for improvements in the way his athletes perform — and has never been able to collect an athlete’s strokes per minute while on the track. Historically, he’s set metronomes to certain beats in the athletes’ indoor training room. But on the track, factors like head and tailwinds play a part in how athletes need to move.

“What we’ve never been able to do is put that in the field,” Bleakney said.

Now, he can tell athletes to increase their cadence going into a strong wind or to hold a sprint pace at 90 strokes per minute — exercises that help them learn what those efforts would feel like in an actual race. The athletes wear a smart watch and use Rithmio’s “Cadence Counter” app, which learns an athlete’s stroke and displays information about their movement on the app.

Bleakney said though the team has been using Rithmio’s technology for a short time, he believes having more precise numbers for his athletes will improve their performance by one to two percent.

“You’re just really getting more precise and surgical in terms of how you’re eliciting those gains and improvements,” he said.

Cadence Counter is still under development by Rithmio, CEO and co-founder Adam Tilton said. The company said there is no timetable for releasing the product to the public yet.

“The intent here is to demonstrate that now, wearable technology can be used to deliver very precise metrics that have a true impact on decision-making,” Tilton said.

He said gesture recognition in wearables has the potential to do much more in the future, like guide physical therapy patients in their movements.

“Wearable devices of the future are definitely going to do that,” Tilton said. “This is one of the first applications where a performance athlete training for something like the Olympics is using a motion sensing-based device to get detailed information on the way that their body mechanics are working,” he said.

mgraham@tribpub.com
Twitter @megancgraham