For her graduation project Leonie Schäper created multiple research prototypes to investigate how athletes with a visual impairment can be supported to be active. In this post I will highlight some of the interesting tools she used while making prototypes.

People with a visual impairement tend to excercise less often. Sports is a significant part of our society: It keeps us healthy and is enjoyable to engage in. But imagine that suddenly, engaging in sports the way you’re used to becomes more challenging. The sport that you always liked becomes frustrating.

One of the challenges during her graduation project was how to prototype the prototypes needed. During the project she used a number of interesting approaches:

Apple shortcuts

Apple describes Shortcuts as: “A shortcut is a quick way to get one or more tasks done with your apps. ”. As a designer it enables you to get signals from apps on a users iPhone or Apple watch. During sport Apple devices collect all kinds of sport data like heartrate and distance traveled. Using shortcuts as a way to combine data from multiple apps, Leonie experimented with giving live feedback.

Voice flow

Voice flow is a tool to build conversational interfaces. During this project it was used to prototype the conversations needed to ask the Athelete about the way they want to structure their training.

OpenAI combined with a small App

Some tests were done to see wether the OpenAI api can provide the athlete with a training plan. By following these steps

1. Ask the athlete for their plans for todays session “I would like to have an easy workout of 30 minutes”
2. Let Swift/ siri transcribe this to text
3. Send the text with am elaborate prompt to openai
4. OpenAI sends back a json file, this json file describes each excercise in the training.
   
5. And Apple watch app will execute each step in the training.

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let baseInstruction =

“““

You work at a gym. You design training programs for atheletes. You describe the excercises in JSON. You don't provide any additional feedback. The JSON you create has to be readable by the following the structure in Swift. Each answer only consists of JSON.  No newline characters or escape characters„


struct FitnessProgram : Codable {
  let excercises : [Excercise]
}

struct Excercise : Codable {
  let name : String
  let interval : [Interval]
}

struct Interval : Codable {
  let name : String
  let duration : Double
  let heartrate : Heartrate
}

struct Heartrate : Codable {
  let lowLimit : Int
  let highLimit : Int
  let zone : Int
}

“““

The prototype showed promise, but proved to be to complex for the timeperiod.