Co-Designing Wearable Technology in Sport: Learnings from Industry and Benefits for End-Users

Implementing co-design in developing technology improves end-user outcomes through imparting their domain-specific knowledge to design teams. Whilst a central tenet in the design of most consumer products, co-design can be lacking in sport - specifically for reimagining common athlete monitoring tools (e.g., GPS, accelerometers). The form factor of hardware, often prioritised at the same time as the plethora of metrics spontaneously available to monitor athletes, highlights a dislocation between design and user needs. This point of misalignment can be traced to the separation of commercial objectives of the sport technology company with the provision of features that might be all important for specific end-users. Nevertheless, co-design processes in other technology domains suggests potential benefits for elite sport end-users, emphasised through greater collaboration between sport technology companies and the industry-based end-user for symbiotic outcomes. The design-based learning framework uses the cyclical process of stakeholder engagement and experimentation loops for improved technology outcomes. A case study in tennis demonstrates the application of these co-design concepts to evaluate and revise novel stroke detection algorithms from pre-existing wearable devices. The benefits of co-design could more efficiently solve common practitioner challenges when adopting wearable technology solutions in sport and improve customer usage and retention rates.