FitSleeve: Designing Wearable Display and Feedback to Improve the Fitness Experience and Motivation

In this article, we focus on fitness workout scenarios. To examine the current practices, we first conducted a substantial user research, through the content analysis procedure we summarized insights regarding fitness purpose, essential data, psychological state, emotional changes and social habits. Subsequently, we generalized related design opportunities of improving the fitness experience and motivation to enhance the fitness performance and communication. Feedback and data representation have great potential to address the challenges, therefore we first proposed a design process for the feedback mode design of fitness workout, including the contextual information, feedback strategy, and realization ways. The feedback designs are implemented on a wearable augmented feedback system ‘FitSleeve’, focusing on individual and group scenarios separately. In group sessions, FitSleeve can demonstrate participants’ experience level, real-time heart rate zone and feedback regarding the correct movement execution. In individual sessions, FitSleeve can display the training progress and provide continuous encouragement. Finally, we evaluated FitSleeve by adopting the System Usability Scale, User Experience Questionnaire, Intrinsic Motivation Inventory and user subjective interviews. The findings indicate the potential of FitSleeve to improve the user experience and motivation of fitness participants.