Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
RBH is strongly inspired by the design requirements for technologies that
encourage physical activity presented by Consolvo et al. [1]: 'Give users proper credit
for their activities', 'Provide personal awareness of activity level', 'Support social
influence' and 'Consider the practical constraints of users' lifestyle'. In RBH, users
are given credit according to their HR intensity and are awarded with an earned
placement on the participants' list. Hence, the list facilitates social influence between
the participants as their placements are determined by their relative performances. As
the interactions are based on HR facts, RBH provides personal awareness of the
activity level in real-time, and additionally enables users to view a history of past
results.
4
User Studies
20 participants (13 female, 7 male) between 20 and 40 years old were recruited to
evaluate the experience of sharing biometric data in real-time between indoor cyclists.
17 participants were recruited while they waited for an indoor cycling class to start
and the remaining three participants were recruited by word of mouth. A total of
seven experiments were conducted over five days, where the number of participants
in each experiment varied from two to four athletes. The duration of each indoor
cycling class was 55 minutes and five of the 20 participants knew each other on
beforehand.
All participants participated once, except three women who insisted to try RBH
twice. One participant had never tried indoor cycling before, four had little
experience, and 15 were experienced indoor cyclist. The experienced cyclists
regularly attended indoor cycling classes between two and six times a week. All
participants said they attended indoor cycling classes because they believed it was an
effective way to burn calories.
As described in the previous section, RBH uses the percentages of the athletes'
MAX HR to calculate and display each athlete's position in the view. If the athletes
knew their MAX HR this value was plotted into RBH, otherwise an estimate of the
athletes MAX HR was calculated by subtracting their age from 220.
Directly after each of the seven indoor cycling classes ended, we conducted a
group interview with the participants about their experience with RBH. The
interviews mainly contained open-ended questions about the athletes' experiences
with the RBH app. The group interviews were audio recorded and extensive notes
were taken during the interviews to allow for further analysis and reflection. We
chose a qualitative approach to investigate and understand how sharing real time
biometric data between indoor cyclists affected the experience of the indoor cycling
class. As we conducted the experiments 'in the wild', it was not possible to
quantitatively evaluate and compare the participants' effort to regular indoor cycling
classes, as no two classes are the same, as described in Section 1.1.
