Snap, Sweat, and Sketch: Designing Home Exercise Experiences for Augmented Reality Head-mounted Displays

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Challenges: Current home exercise methods may lack appeal and interactivity. Although augmented reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) have the potential to improve the home exercise experience, there is a lack of systematic research on how to effectively personalize the augmentation of household objects to support different types of exercises.
• Significance: The global issue of insufficient physical activity has significant health implications. Home exercise can reduce economic and cultural barriers, but its success depends on participants' motivation and commitment. Enhancing the appeal and immersion of home exercise is key to addressing this issue.
• Research Motivation: While there has been research on using AR HMDs for exercise, these studies often focus on specific populations (e.g., older adults or rehabilitation patients) or specific health issues, failing to fully explore how household objects can be augmented to accommodate diverse home exercise scenarios. Additionally, existing augmentation suggestions often lack specific design guidelines tailored to different types of exercises.

Solution

• Proposed Approach:
  1. Design a multi-phase study combining design activities and focus group discussions to explore user preferences for augmenting household objects.
  2. Collect participants' augmentation design ideas and analyze how users creatively augment household objects, particularly non-traditional exercise tools.
• Innovations:
  1. Use Snapchat as a low-cost and convenient tool to simulate AR augmentation designs.
  2. Introduce participatory design into the AR scenario planning for home exercise, combining focus group discussions to generate meaningful augmentation themes and design guidelines.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Use a pre-activity questionnaire to ensure participants understand AR concepts.
  2. Conduct user-generated design activities using Snapchat, where participants create augmentation ideas based on everyday household objects.
  3. Refine user-submitted ideas through focus group discussions to identify priority design strategies for enhancing exercise experience and motivation.
  4. Analyze the collected data to generate five augmentation themes and further derive design guidelines.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:
  1. Identified five core themes for augmenting household objects, including augmentations based on object properties and actions, meaningful interactions, and augmentations of non-direct exercise objects.
  2. Developed six core design guidelines, providing systematic recommendations for augmenting household objects to support exercise.
  3. Highlighted participant-contributed augmentation ideas, such as enhancing a chair into a monster or fish tank, or transforming a water bottle into an interactive target, offering design inspiration.
• Advantages:
  Compared to existing solutions, this research places greater emphasis on diverse user needs, highlighting personalized and interactive design. By addressing object characteristics, exercise actions, and user motivation, the study advances the application of AR HMDs in home exercise.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  Analysis results indicate that users tend to choose augmented objects with similar attributes or actions and prefer designs with personal emotional value or interactivity. Additionally, participant discussions revealed that cultural backgrounds and personal experiences influence preferences for augmented objects.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. The current study primarily focuses on healthy young adults, lacking comprehensive investigation of children, older adults, and multicultural groups.
  2. Using Snapchat as a method may underestimate the needs of users less familiar with technology; future research could explore additional design tools.
  3. The proposed design guidelines have not yet been validated by users, requiring practical application testing to assess their effectiveness.
  4. Further research is needed to ensure the safety of augmented object designs and their impact on exercise outcomes and long-term health.

Conclusion: This study combines participatory design and user-generated content analysis to propose design guidelines for augmenting household objects through AR HMDs to support diverse exercise scenarios. It lays the foundation for developing safer, more engaging, and personalized home exercise systems while providing new perspectives on the application of AR HMDs in health data and home use contexts.