Personal Informatics for Sport: Meaning, Body, and Social Relations in Amateur and Elite Athletes

Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes’ performance in many sports. In this article, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACM transactions on computer-human interaction 2018, Vol.25 (3), p.1-30
Main Authors: Rapp, Amon, Tirabeni, Lia
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes’ performance in many sports. In this article, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an array of PI devices, to explore how sports, as well as athletes’ experience, are affected by such instruments. We discovered that amateur athletes present different patterns of usage compared to elite ones. Moreover, we found that elite athletes make sense of their data by exploiting the knowledge they have about their own body and sports practice. We then proposed four considerations for design that we believe should be explored in the future, to reflect on how self-tracking is changing our perspective on sports, and, by and large, on our everyday life.
ISSN:1073-0516
1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/3196829