This paper presents a literature review of humancomputer interaction works on wearable systems for sports. We selected a corpus of 57 papers and analyzed them through the grounded theory for literature review approach. We identified five themes across the papers: the different research perspectives, the type of sports and sportspeople, the roles of wearables in sports, their wearability, and the different types of feedback. These themes helped us in delineating opportunities for future research: the investigation of different form factors and types of feedback; the consideration of different sportspeople and collaborative tasks; the need of pushing the boundaries of the sports domain; the exploration of the evolution of sports; the interconnection of different devices; and the increase of methodological rigor.
In this paper, we present a field study on the learning of climbing aimed at defining the design space of wearable devices to support beginners. Three main findings have emerged from our study. First, climbing has a strong emotional impact on beginners; therefore, learning to climb requires mastering new motor patterns as well as negative emotions, such as stress and fear. Second, the feeling of danger that climbers often experience can be mitigated by trust in the climbing partner and the perception of her active presence. Finally, a big problem in climbing is the communication difficulty between the climbing partners and between climber and instructor. We conclude the paper presenting four design considerations for the design of wearable devices meant to support the learning of climbing by providing the actors involved with augmented communication. Such augmented communication should address both the physical and the emotional difficulties of this sport.
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