Designing a smart plantar to support people in sport activities

Assunta Matassa matassa@di.unito.it

University of Torino,Department of Computer Science

Goal

This paper describes a study for designing a smart plantar supporting correct body behaviour during sport activities.

The plantar allows people to monitor their movements during sport activities in order to reveal and predict any eventual

incorrect behaviour.

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Background\1

Posture and gesture analysis and the monitoring of body motions represent topics of increasing interest in many research fields.The emergence of wearable accessories, e-textiles, nano-sensors that are not only flexible, but also conformable to the human body, establishes a breakthrough for many area of interest and especially for the health.

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Background\2

There are several applications of wearable technologies in the area of health care.

These technologies, in fact, represent an innovative way for people to control and manage their personal parameters by themselves .

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Background\3

These phenomena appear strictly related to Quantified Self (QS).

Qs is a movement that helps people to acquire personal data on different aspects of their daily lives, like the activities performed, the space visited, people encountered, physiological and psychological states.

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Background\4Combination of wearable accessories and quantified self tools seem to be useful

especially for the health.

Research question

Starting from this insight, we will adopt wearable technologies as valuable means for supporting health care

and wellness.

The main aim of this work would be the design of a wearable tool for supporting sportspeople in their activities, making them aware about emerging disadvantages due to excessive physical activities and overtraining and bad

postures.

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Motivation

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ENGAGEMENT.

People engaged in sport are used to take care about their health and their lifestyle, following special diets, doing frequent exercises, and more generally, giving a large attention to their body.

CONTROL.

Monitoring athletic preparation through self-reporting measures would facilitate the adjustment of practices to optimize performance outcomes and to prevent the emergence of postural impairment.

MOTIVATION.

The solution could provide an efficient support for motivating them to change their bad attitudes

Design Solution

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We present a personalised smart plantar that works as a wearable sensing garments capable of recording

proprioceptive maps of body motions with no discomfort for the users during sport activities.

In fact, it is a non-obtrusive instrument, capable to track data in a seamless way and without interfering with sport activities.

Related Works\posture

Many studies explore the potentialities offered by technologies to support wellness and health, especially focusing on postural problems.

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Lumo Lift Darma UpRight

Related Works\sport

Many studies explore the potentialities offered by technologies to support wellness and health, especially focusing on postural problems.

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RunSaffer OpenGoSensoria

All of these projects mentioned above focus on providing standardized product to users, without considering their personal features and needs.

We intend to give each individual user the opportunity to personalise her own product taking into account personal requirements and

preferences and exploiting the capabilities offered by rapid prototyping instruments.

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1.

1.CREATION: (i) Taking an image of users' feet and design a customizable plantar using a 3D printer; (ii) selecting a set of sensors that allowing to enhance the plantar;

2. EXPERIENCE: Adopting the developed plantar during everyday activities;

3. RETHINK: Visualization of the stored data and the manipulation of them through a mobile application to support the behavioral change.

User Experience

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1. The user needs to take three photos of her feet using her smartphone.

2. Starting from the pictures of the arch, heel and ankle it is possible to generate a map the key anatomical features that make the individual foot and gait unique.

3. The personal model of plantar can be augmented with additional personal features such as shoe type, weight, kind of activities, etc.

4. After the modeling process, the plantar will be ready for printing using a 3D printer and some selected material such as Nylon plastic.

1° Step: design your personal plantar

During the experience with the proposed prototype, the user can register her personal data using a smart plantar located inside her shoes and physically connected with a set of sensors able to measure different parameters.

2° Step: develop your personal plantar

1. The mobile application provides some brief indications about the gathered data, highlighting the emergence of incorrect positions, motions and eventually signals relative to overtraining.

2. The main effort will due to the visualisation and representation process of collected data in order to obtain user-friendly and meaningful representations of them.

3° Step: retrieve and monitor your performance

Early Evaluation

• We decided to conduct a session of bodystorming to provide every member of the sample group a first hand experience, giving attention to the contextual features in the space close to the real- setting.

• The sample group will be providing of an experience prototyping as a form of prototyping based on a direct engagement of people in designing activities.

The combination of a bodystorming session with the use of experience prototyping will give to sample group a global

experience of usage of the smart plantar in real contexts of use.

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As an iterative process, this early evaluation would be a first step towards the definition of the final concept.

Expected results

1. understand the acceptability and the usability of the proposed concept;

2. make the users aware about their movements and encourage them to adopt more correct ones thanks to the information collected by mobile application;

3. give designers the opportunity to conceptualize other system features, and to redefine the existing ones.

Assunta Matassa

University of Torino

matassa@di.unito.it

Thank you for the attention!

Q&A