How should we develop an intimate and meaningful conversation with our own body?
Angl° is a training outfit that creates sound feedback through real-time body data. It transforms meaningless data into melodic soundscape to enable recreational athletes to subconsciously develop a stronger awareness of their body condition and change their behaviors in time. Through this mutual communication, the optimal goal is to prevent injuries before it occurs
"The design of the object and interaction solves a very real problem and it looks like it has the beginnings of a novel, pleasant and effective interface."
— Juries of Core77 Design AwarD
TIME: 2 Weeks (Feb,2014)
SCHOOL: Umeå Institute of Design
TEAM: Yedan Qian, Júlia Nacsa, Taís Mauk, Joakim Bergbom
CONTRIBUTION: Sound Design, Interactive Prototype, Product Design
SKILLS: Arduino, Processing, Audacity, Premiere
Interaction Exploration
A Better Exercise Experience
Through research, we found avoiding repetitive injuries and maintaining a proper intensity are important.
A good upper body posture lets you use your core muscles at their maximum and relaxes your joints, back and shoulder, which can reduce most of the repetitive injuries.
Proper training intensity can reduce the lower leg injuries and make the most of your workout experience.Working too hard may lead to injuries and burnout, while not working hard enough may end in unsatisfying results.
Sound As Interaction
The key is to find an proper interaction modality to provide real-time feedback.
Nowadays, sound is widely used to boost the workout experience but has never been used to increase user’s awareness of posture and tempo. Its advantage is that people can easily understand the meaning of sound and sense the change subconsciously.
Ideation: Increase Awareness
Posture: when posture collapse, we use dissonant sound to increase user’s tension ( by changing sound scale, rhythm, pitch)
Intensity: user creates the initial tempo and the tempo slows down and speeds up subtly to guide users to optimal tempo
User Test: Sound Interpretation
Methods: asking people to try prototype and talk about their interpretation of different sound feedback.
Findings: interpretations of sound depend on the context of use. For sports, it was most accepted to listen to a rhythmic music with mild dissonance and tension. And to increase tension, scale and rhythm change are much stronger than pitch and timbre change.
Technology
The accelerometer measures the user’s exercising tempo in order to generate the initial tempo of the soundscape.
The heartbeat sensor measures the heart rate. And if the heart rate is not within the optimal domain (60%-80% of Maximum Heart Rate), Angl° will change the tempo of the music to guide user to slow down or speed up.
The stretch sensor at the back measures the distance between the two scapulas to identify whether the posture is correct and relaxing. If the posture is bad, the sound will change to dissonant to imply the user to pay more attention to posture.