As Light as You Aspire to Be

Abstract

Supporting exercise adherence through technology remains an important HCI challenge. Recent works showed that altering walking sounds leads people perceiving themselves as thinner/lighter, happier and walking more dynamically. While this novel approach shows potential for physical activity, it raises critical questions impacting technology design. We ran two studies in the context of exertion (gymstep, stairs-climbing) to investigate how individual factors impact the effect of sound and the duration of the aftereffects. The results confirm that the effects of sound in body-perception occur even in physically demanding situations and through ubiquitous wearable devices. We also show that the effect of sound interacted with participants' body weight and masculinity/femininity aspirations, but not with gender. Additionally, changes in body-perceptions did not hold once the feedback stopped; however, body-feelings or behavioural changes appeared to persist for longer. We discuss the results in terms of malleability of body-perception and highlight opportunities for supporting exercise adherence. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction paradigms; Auditory feedback.

SoniBand: Understanding the Effects of Metaphorical Movement Sonifications on Body Perception and Physical Activity

“…The main contributions of our work are 1) our wearable device, SoniBand, which brings early prototypes (e.g., [18,41]) to a compact version to be used in ubiquitous environments, and includes a new sonification (Tone); 2) qualitative insights on how the body perception and PA was affected by different metaphorical sounds for participants in two different populations; and 3) a set of design considerations regarding particular sound qualities and characteristics to inform future research on metaphorical sonifications. These contribute to the body of work on sensory feedback, and in particular movement sonification [18,25,37,40,42] to alter body perception. The novelty of our work lies in the use of metaphorical sonifications to address negative/distorted body perceptions in the context of PA [3].…”

“…The alteration of one's perceived body may in turn have an effect on motor behavior and PA capabilities. For example, recent studies showed that altering the natural footsteps sounds produced by a person walking can make the person feel slimmer and lighter and adapt their walking behavior; if the person is exercising (i.e., using a gym step or climbing stairs), they will report that the exercise is easier, that they are less tired and that they can go faster [40,42]. While these works focused on altering the natural sounds produced by the body as a source of body alteration, an alternative approach to change body perception could be employing movement sonification.…”

“…Yet, an understanding of how particular sounds characteristics elicited these effects is missing, as well as an understanding on how the observed effects may be specific to physically inactive (vs. active) populations, due to their particular negative or distorted body perceptions and body-related perceived barriers. [42] showed an inverted effect of altered body-produced sound in people that wished to have a heavier body vs. people that wished to be lighter. Further, because that study [18] was a controlled laboratory study, only looking at short-term effect, the effects of long exposure to metaphorical sonifications are unknown.…”

“…Prior work has begun to show that sensory feedback [3,44,45], and in particular sound feedback accompanying movement, can alter body perception (e.g., [18,25,40]). For instance, some of these works have shown that appropriately altering the perception of naturally body-produced sounds, such as the footstep sounds produced when walking, leads to positive perceptions such as feeling lighter or happier [40,42]. These works exploit bottom-up mechanisms related to body perception, by which bodily sensory information is continuously being used by our brains to adapt the mental models of our body, thus allowing to efficiently guide our motor interactions [3].…”

“…These contribute to the body of work on altering body perception through sensory feedback, and in particular, through movement sonification (e.g., [18,25,37,40,42]).…”