game.impulse Interactive Sports Techn. & Exertion Games

Abstract

Sports technology such as fitness trackers, smart watches or heart rate sensors have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Together with general advances in gaming technology this enables “athletes” to exercise in a playful manner. Besides the general assumption that this technology improves motivation to exercise more often, it also enables the athlete to get a better understanding of her current form and technique. However, current sports technology is mainly focused on quantifiable performance indicators such as mileage, pace, cadence, watts, heart rate, etc. For recreational athletes, it is often difficult to interpret such numbers especially while being immersed in an activity.

Complex exercises and motor movements might be difficult to learn through an interactive system or game. An effective analysis of the actual performance of the motor movements can only be provided by professionals or expert coaches using post-workout slow motion video analysis. Since most athletes have no clue about biomechanics and no access to a professional coach, this might lead to adaptation of wrong techniques and might even cause injuries. To overcome these problems, it is necessary to go beyond feedback that addresses just the quantitative aspects of the exercise and focus on meaningful guidance that gives insights into the qualitative aspects of the exercise. Designing such interactive assistance systems brings a lot of challenges. The system has to sense the user's movements, interpret them, and guide her in such a way that she is able to easily adapt to the changes the system suggests. To achieve this, a deliberate choice of both sensors and actuators has to be made.

In this talk we aim to discuss interactive systems and exertion games that guide the athletes performance while exercising. Topics of interest range from engineering problems to research methods as they apply in the context of HCI and sports.