Specifying relevant textural properties for unobtrusive feedback on sports performance

Abstract

Textural changes can be promising to give feedback on sportspeople's performance who needs less attention demanding modalities. However, previous research does not address which textural property's change would be more appropriate to give information in specific contexts, i.e. sports performance feedback. We focus on sport towels as a case to understand how to give feedback on sports performance through changes in textural properties. We address the gap by conducting experiments with 32 sportspeople to investigate (1) the textural properties (i.e. roughness) that can be perceived by sportspeople through a towel and (2) that can convey information on sportspeople's performance (i.e. smooth texture - good performance). The results indicate that hardness and bendability are appropriate to convey information about sportspeople's performance. To the best of our knowledge, this result is the first to explore that a change in the state of a textural property is able to give a specific feedback.