THESIS

By Froukje Temme , Sept 17, 2022

Nowadays, interactive technology is becoming more embedded in the world of sports. Whereas much is available for the regular athlete, little is tailored specially to the needs of athletes with intellectual disabilities. This is unfortunate for this user group since they can profit a lot from the benefits of interactive technology, such as improving motor skills, social skills, and self-esteem. Via literature research, interviews, and observations, it has been shown that special athletes experience difficulties with verbally explained exercises. Many of them experience some sort of language comprehension, memory deficit, short attention span, impulsive behavior, and/or hearing deficit, which makes it hard for them to comprehend verbal information. This causes the children to not understand and not be engaged in the exercise and the training. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the use of alternative media to facilitate the instruction of motor movement for special athletes.

The creative technology design process is used as a base to address this gap in research, which consists of the ideation, specification, realization, and evaluation phase. This has eventually led to a prototype, which is an add-on instruction system for athletics equipment, that will guide athletes with intellectual disabilities through exercises. This prototype has come forth out of (non-)functional system requirements and is afterward tested with three user tests. In these tests, it became clear that with the prototype; fewer mistakes are made, exercises are completed faster, less time is needed for verbal explanation and more children understand the exercises at once. The special athletes express their preference for the system and the trainer reveals positive feelings towards the prototype. The prototype has achieved its goal, which is to improve understanding and engagement in exercises for children with intellectual disabilities. Certain limitations, such as the number of test participants and the number of obstacles have to be further researched before a general claim for all special athletes can be made.

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