Make special climbing holds with RFID scanners in them. These are your starting holds and your finishing holds.
Sell wristbands or something with RFID tags in them. RFID tag is coded to a climber. Upon starting a route, the start hold scans your chip, and upon finishing (if you finish) it gets scanned.
Now you can use an Elo rating algorithm (think chess ratings, or various video games use it now, too) to rate both routes and climbers in a statistically objective way. If there is any intermixing of climbers among gyms who both have this system, you get cross-gym normalization for free.
Finishing a route counts as the climber "defeating" the route. Likewise, failing a route counts as a route "defeating" the climber. This suffices to create a rating, even though the matchmaking graph is bipartite (e.g. there is no way to have two climbers play each other or two routes play each other).
* A lot of people don't carry their phone around with them in the gym.
* Added friction. My favorite thing about bouldering (as opposed to top roping or something) is that I can just hop on and off the wall without any setup.
* Doesn't measure failures (unless people manually input them, which is adding friction on top of the annoyance of not finishing the route).
Many gyms already have QR codes on their routes and several climbing sites accept them as part of entering your routes and discussing them. But if you want to build a custom piece of hardware and manufacture it, convince people and gyms to buy it and maintain it and then convince an existing site or service to support it, good luck to ya
Make special climbing holds with RFID scanners in them. These are your starting holds and your finishing holds.
Sell wristbands or something with RFID tags in them. RFID tag is coded to a climber. Upon starting a route, the start hold scans your chip, and upon finishing (if you finish) it gets scanned.
Now you can use an Elo rating algorithm (think chess ratings, or various video games use it now, too) to rate both routes and climbers in a statistically objective way. If there is any intermixing of climbers among gyms who both have this system, you get cross-gym normalization for free.
Finishing a route counts as the climber "defeating" the route. Likewise, failing a route counts as a route "defeating" the climber. This suffices to create a rating, even though the matchmaking graph is bipartite (e.g. there is no way to have two climbers play each other or two routes play each other).