Unpacking How Pole Dancers Experience the Use of Fitness Trackers

Paper Title

Unpacking How Pole Dancers Come to Experience the Use of Fitness Trackers

Publication Info

• Topic area: Intersection of personal informatics and non-normative physical activities, focusing on pole dance.
• Keywords: Pole dance, fitness trackers, personal informatics, wearables, embodied interaction, soma design, pluralism, feminist HCI, movement tracking, sensor design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Fitness trackers are predominantly designed for activities like running or walking, which align with step-count-based tracking. They fail to accommodate non-ambulatory, dynamic, and artistic practices such as pole dance, leaving a gap in understanding how such activities can be supported by self-tracking technologies.
• Significance: Pole dance is a physically demanding and somatic practice that challenges the universalist assumptions of fitness trackers. Addressing this gap could lead to more inclusive and effective designs for diverse physical activities.
• Motivation and related work: While prior work in personal informatics has focused on cardio-based activities and repetitive exercises, limited research has explored wearables for non-traditional practices like pole dance. Existing studies on wearables in dance and sports highlight the need to rethink sensor placement, data representation, and user goals. This paper builds on these insights to explore pole dance as a pluralistic and somatic activity.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Investigating the use of fitness trackers in pole dance through qualitative interviews with practitioners, to understand their physical and data-related experiences and propose design considerations rooted in pluralism and soma design.
• Novelty:
  1. Examining the unique physical and cultural dimensions of pole dance in the context of fitness tracking.
  2. Highlighting the limitations of current fitness trackers in capturing dynamic, non-linear movements and somatic experiences.
  3. Proposing pluralistic and soma design principles to reimagine sensing and data representation.
  4. Identifying practical challenges and workarounds used by pole dancers to adapt fitness trackers to their practice.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 pole dancers and instructors, focusing on their experiences with fitness trackers.
  • Analyzed data using thematic analysis to identify key themes related to movement, device use, and data interpretation.
  • Explored the implications of findings for sensor design, wearable form factors, and data representation.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Fitness trackers often fail to capture the complexity of pole dance movements, such as gripping, squeezing, and climbing, leading to incomplete or inaccurate data.
  • Participants used workarounds, such as selecting unrelated activity modes (e.g., "dance" or "circus arts") or manually switching tracker placement between wrists.
  • Many participants valued somatic awareness over device data, emphasizing the importance of "feeling" their bodies during practice.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • This study uniquely highlights the inadequacies of current fitness trackers for non-normative activities and proposes pluralistic design principles to address these gaps.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Interviews with 20 participants (17 instructors, 3 students) with an average of 6.5 years of pole experience.
  • Participants included users and non-users of fitness trackers, providing diverse perspectives on device utility and limitations.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study focused on recreational pole dancers and did not include perspectives from sex workers or competitive athletes.
  • Future work should involve participatory soma design methods to co-create new wearable technologies with pole dancers.
  • Broader applications to other non-normative activities, such as gymnastics or rock climbing, should be explored.

Summary

This paper investigates the use of fitness trackers in pole dance, a dynamic and somatic practice that challenges the universalist assumptions of current wearable technologies. Through interviews with 20 pole dancers, the study reveals significant limitations in how trackers capture complex movements and somatic experiences. Participants highlighted the importance of "feeling" their bodies and often adapted or abandoned trackers due to their inadequacies. The authors propose reimagining fitness tracking through pluralistic and soma design principles, emphasizing the need for new sensor types, wearable forms, and data representations. These findings have implications for designing inclusive technologies for diverse physical activities.