Summary
Gobi, is a PhD Design student at Brunel, with an engineering undergraduate and design postgraduate qualifications. Having completed his major projects relating to the sports industry, his current area of research is in Wearable technology for football players.
Project Outline
For the sports industry it is important to identify, how the gameplay needs improving, and what the user should use as progressive benchmarks. Quantifying these data is what shows progress. We live in a “self obsessed era”, where we are matching quantity data to success (heaviest deadlift rep, number of social media followers). Human centred advancements are making this more of a norm, and people are increasingly desiring this sort of application in their daily lives (e.g. number of calories burned via Fitbit).
Data monitoring is easy, but to produce “meaningful data” is hard, and in sports terms, most are very subjective, where stats alone do not define performance. How the device can record data, convert it and send it to the user (APP) is where the study's focus would be. How it educates the significance of a body's movement to improve desired performance attributes, as well as monitoring risky manoeuvres to prevent injury, is where the user's focus would be.
It is very important that the wearable system, can produce meaningful data, constantly adapting for new user needs. Reiterating the user centred principles will be the hardest, as the type of consumers vary greatly. Human centred research must be made both as a product, such as the wearable device itself (sensor calibration and electronic advancements to increase data transfer), and UX/UI (APP) which communicates these data to the user.