The holidays brought out a bunch of “the year in consumer technology” articles. Some focused on wearable personal health technology. Consumers and consumer technology play an important part in shaping sports science and athletes’ technology.
User interfaces for athletes’ technology are, in general, poor, like you expext with early-stage technologies. Lousy interfaces also describes most consumer health technologies, but consumer devices, given their larger markets, benefit from greater resources for interaction design, usability and engineering.
Consumer health technology interfaces are important starting points for athletes’ interfaces. They are going to evolve together but remember that all of these devices are new technologies and they will improve. It’s easy to point out the flaws when you trace back the usability and adoption problems. It’s harder to create designs that anticipate the long-term habits that these technologies will change in people and in athletes. Read more:
- Best and worst fitness wearables of 2016: The year of the second-gen devices (Ars Technica, Valentina Palladino)
- Sports tech in 2017: What’s next after wrist-worn wearables and fitness trackers? (SI.com, Tom Taylor)
- Will Consumers Change Their Minds About Wearables In 2017? (Fast Company, Mark Sullivan)
- Fitness Trackers Fail Because They’re Not Human (Outside Online, Brad Stulberg)
- Embracing bad bad ideas to get to the good ( Harvard Business Review, John Geraci)
- Consumers want to work out with — not for — their wearables (ReadWrite, David Curry)
- Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking (Backchannel, Cathy O’Neil)
- AI and Unreliable Electronics (*batteries not included) (Pete Warden’s blog)
- Real Time Quantification of Dangerousity in Football Using Spatiotemporal Tracking Data (PLOS One; Daniel Link et al)
- How Researchers Can Utilize Novel Wearable Sensor Technologies to Secure Research Funding (MC10, Erika Vazquez)
- How to Make Sense of Team Sport Data: From Acquisition to Data Modeling and Research Aspects (Data journal)
- Wearable Makers Want You to Want Them (USA Today Tech, Mike Feibus)
More things that I read and liked last week:
- Olympic sports psychologist: The best thing athletes can do mentally to win (December 31, Excelle Sports, Kim Vandenberg)
- The Man Behind the Badger Basketball Scenes: Erik Helland (December 31, Fansided, Badger of Honor blog)
- Want to Play Football at Ohio State or Clemson? Try Playing Other Sports, Too (December 30, The New York Times, Karen Crouse)
- She was on course for stardom. Then she entrusted her career to USA Swimming (December 30, The Washington Post, Will Hobson)
- New Head of Nutrition Gives Liverpool a Taste of Premier League Success (December 27, The New York Times, Rory Smith)