A Real-time Auditory Biofeedback System for Sports Swimming

This paper introduces a novel hardware and software system to measure, process, and sonify the instantaneous hydrodynamic pressure at any surface of the human body during sports swimming. In particular, we use four sensors attached to the palmar and dorsal side of the hands to calculate the net pressure difference of piezo probes, corresponding to the net energy transferred to water due to hand actions. The information corresponds to the feel-forwater which is critical to improve the effectiveness of swimming. With our system the information is conveyed, using audio, by interactive sonifications using in-ear headphones, allowing a stereo spatialized sound representation of the interaction of both hands and water. For the first time, we hereby demonstrate in-waterexperience of swimming actions using sonification. We focus on the system setup and present two parameter-mapping sonification designs that represent differently derived information and illustrate the system performance with interaction videos.