Designing copresent cycling experience

Abstract

There has been much UbiComp research into motivating people to live more active and healthy lifestyle with sports. The idea behind these approaches is centered on social and peer effects in enhancing exercise adherence. While research of this kind has been prolific, there has very little work been done to identify factors that embody comfortable and informed accompanied exercise experience. This paper takes an increasingly attractive cycling theme as a testbed and proposes an unobtrusive and intuitive interface arrangement based on light. It can create a sense of being together with each other for distant apart cyclists. The initial results yield a good level of comprehension and motivation towards the use of the interface. The hope is that the elicited recommendations can guide the design of UbiComp technologies for social motivational physical exercises. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.