skip to main content
research-article

FootStriker: An EMS-based Foot Strike Assistant for Running

Published: 30 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In running, knee-related injuries are very common. The main cause are high impact forces when striking the ground with the heel first. Mid- or forefoot running is generally known to reduce impact loads and to be a more efficient running style. In this paper, we introduce a wearable running assistant, consisting of an electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) device and an insole with force sensing resistors. It detects heel striking and actuates the calf muscles during the flight phase to control the foot angle before landing. We conducted a user study, in which we compared the classical coaching approach using slow motion video analysis as a terminal feedback to our proposed real-time EMS feedback. The results show that EMS actuation significantly outperforms traditional coaching, i.e., a decreased average heel striking rate, when using the system. As an implication, EMS feedback can generally be beneficial for the motor learning of complex, repetitive movements.

Supplementary Material

JPG File (1938-imwut-2017_vol1issue1.jpg)
FootStriker.mp4 (1938-imwut-2017_vol1issue1.mp4)
Video supplemental file associated with FootStriker: An EMS-based Foot Strike Assistant for Running

References

[1]
CB Cunningham. 2010. The influence of foot posture on the cost of transport in humansnr. J Exp Biol 213 (2010), 790--797.
[2]
Adam I. Daoud, Gary J. Geissler, Frank Wang, Jason Saretsky, Yahya A. Daoud, and Daniel E. Lieberman. 2012. Foot strike and injury rates in endurance runners: A retrospective study. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 44, 7 (2012), 1325--1334.
[3]
BC Elliott and BA Blanksby. 1976. A cinematographic analysis of overground and treadmill running by males and females. Med Sci Sports 8, 2 (1976), 84--87.
[4]
ExerciseSurvey. 2016. (2016). http://www.sodahead.com/survey/featured/exercise-survey/?results=1
[5]
Marlène Giandolini, Pierrick J. Arnal, Guillaume Y. Millet, Nicolas Peyrot, Pierre Samozino, Blaise Dubois, and Jean Benoît Morin. 2013. Impact reduction during running: Efficiency of simple acute interventions in recreational runners. European Journal of Applied Physiology 113, 3 (2013), 599--609.
[6]
Holger Harms, Oliver Amft, Rene Winkler, Johannes Schumm, Martin Kusserow, and Gerhard Tröster. 2010. Ethos: Miniature orientation sensor for wearable human motion analysis. In Sensors, 2010 IEEE. IEEE, 1037--1042.
[7]
Daniel Harrison, Paul Marshall, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, and Jon Bird. 2015. Activity Tracking: Barriers, Workarounds and Customisation. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 617--621.
[8]
Hiroshi Hasegawa, Takeshi Yamauchi, and William J Kraemer. 2007. Foot strike patterns of runners at the 15-km point during an elite-level half marathon. The Journal of Strength 8 Conditioning Research 21, 3 (2007), 888--893.
[9]
Kevin Huang, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and Thad Starner. 2008. PianoTouch: A wearable haptic piano instruction system for passive learning of piano skills. In 2008 12th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers. IEEE, 41--44.
[10]
Mads Møller Jensen and Florian’Floyd’ Mueller. 2014. Running with technology: Where are we heading?. In Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design. ACM, 527--530.
[11]
James F Knight, Chris Baber, Anthony Schwirtz, and Huw W Bristow. 2002. The Comfort Assessment of Wearable Computers. In iswc, Vol. 2. 65--74.
[12]
Pedro Lopes and Patrick Baudisch. 2013. Muscle-propelled force feedback: bringing force feedback to mobile devices. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2577--2580.
[13]
Pedro Lopes, Alexandra Ion, and Patrick Baudisch. 2015. Impacto: Simulating Physical Impact by Combining Tactile Stimulation with Electrical Muscle Stimulation. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software 8 Technology. ACM, 11--19.
[14]
Pedro Lopes, Patrik Jonell, and Patrick Baudisch. 2015. Affordance++: Allowing Objects to Communicate Dynamic Use. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2515--2524.
[15]
Rainer Malaka. 2014. How Computer Games Can Improve Your Health and Fitness. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 1--7.
[16]
Tom F Novacheck. 1998. The biomechanics of running. Gait 8 posture 7, 1 (1998), 77--95.
[17]
Stina Nylander, Jakob Tholander, Florian ’Floyd’ Mueller, and Joseph Marshall. 2015. HCI and Sports. interactions 22, 2 (Feb. 2015), 30--31.
[18]
Max Pfeiffer, Tim Duente, and Michael Rohs. 2016. Let your body move: a prototyping toolkit for wearable force feedback with electrical muscle stimulation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. ACM, 418--427.
[19]
Max Pfeiffer, Tim Dünte, Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt, and Michael Rohs. 2015. Cruise Control for Pedestrians: Controlling Walking Direction using Electrical Muscle Stimulation. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2505--2514.
[20]
Max Pfeiffer, Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt, and Michael Rohs. 2014. Let me grab this: a comparison of EMS and vibration for haptic feedback in free-hand interaction. In Proceedings of the 5th Augmented Human International Conference. ACM, 48.
[21]
John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers Chalmers. 2014. Personal Tracking As Lived Informatics. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1163--1172.
[22]
Carey E Rothschild. 2012. Primitive running: a survey analysis of runners’ interest, participation, and implementation. The Journal of Strength 8 Conditioning Research 26, 8 (2012), 2021--2026.
[23]
Caitlyn E Seim, David Quigley, and Thad E Starner. 2014. Passive haptic learning of typing skills facilitated by wearable computers. In CHI’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2203--2208.
[24]
Christina Strohrmann, Holger Harms, Gerhard Tröster, Stefanie Hensler, and Roland Müller. 2011. Out of the lab and into the woods: kinematic analysis in running using wearable sensors. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing. ACM, 119--122.
[25]
Christina Strohrmann, Julia Seiter, Yurima Llorca, and Gerhard Tröster. 2013. Can Smartphones Help with Running Technique? Procedia Computer Science 19 (2013), 902--907.
[26]
Zhimei Tan, Huihua Liu, Tiebin Yan, Dongmei Jin, Xiaokuo He, Xiuyuan Zheng, Shuwei Xu, and Chunmei Tan. 2014. The effectiveness of functional electrical stimulation based on a normal gait pattern on subjects with early stroke: a randomized controlled trial. BioMed research international 2014 (2014).
[27]
Jakob Tholander and Stina Nylander. 2015. Snot, Sweat, Pain, Mud, and Snow: Performance and Experience in the Use of SportsWatches. Proceedings of the ACM CHI’15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1 (2015), 2913--2922.
[28]
Bobbie RN van Gent, Danny D Siem, Marienke van Middelkoop, Ton AG van Os, Sita SMA Bierma-Zeinstra, and Bart BW Koes. 2007. Incidence and determinants of lower extremity running injuries in long distance runners: a systematic review. British journal of sports medicine (2007).
[29]
M Wijnen, MB Hoppenbrouwers, and JWM Willems. 2009. Runalyser: Real Time Analysis of Running Technique in Practice (P196). In The Engineering of Sport 7. Springer, 289--295.
[30]
KEITH R Williams and PETER R Cavanagh. 1987. Relationship between distance running mechanics, running economy, and performance. Journal of Applied Physiology 63, 3 (1987), 1236--1245.
[31]
WinterGreen. 2015. Smart Wearables, Sport and Fitness: Market Shares, Strategy, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2015 to 2021. (2015). http://www.wintergreenresearch.com/wearables-sports-and-fitness

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Into the Rhythm: Evaluating Breathing Instruction Sound Experiences on the Run with Novice Female RunnersMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti80400258:4(25)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Multimodal Sports Interaction: Wearables and HCI in MotionCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677560(952-955)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)GestureShirt: Eyes-Free Interaction while RunningCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677557(244-248)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 1
March 2017
62 pages
EISSN:2474-9567
DOI:10.1145/3075646
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 March 2017
Accepted: 01 January 2017
Revised: 01 January 2017
Received: 01 November 2016
Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Electrical muscle stimulation
  2. in-situ feedback
  3. motor learning
  4. motor skills
  5. online feedback
  6. real-time assistance
  7. real-time feedback
  8. running
  9. sports training
  10. wearable devices
  11. wearables

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)110
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)14
Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Into the Rhythm: Evaluating Breathing Instruction Sound Experiences on the Run with Novice Female RunnersMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti80400258:4(25)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Multimodal Sports Interaction: Wearables and HCI in MotionCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677560(952-955)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)GestureShirt: Eyes-Free Interaction while RunningCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677557(244-248)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Detecting Foot Strikes during Running with EarbudsProceedings of the Workshop on Body-Centric Computing Systems10.1145/3662009.3662023(35-40)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)BreathPro: Monitoring Breathing Mode during Running with EarablesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36596078:2(1-25)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
  • (2024)Investigating Technology Adoption Soon After Sustaining a Spinal Cord InjuryProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435078:1(1-24)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • (2024)GestureShirt: Exploring Gestures in Front of the Body for Truly Mobile Interaction while RunningAdjunct Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3640471.3680443(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2024
  • (2024)FitSight: Tracking and Feedback Engine for Personalized Fitness TrainingProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3627043.3659547(223-231)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Foot Augmentation 101: Design your own Augmented ExperiencesProceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3623509.3634744(1-4)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2024
  • (2024)SplitBody: Reducing Mental Workload while Multitasking via Muscle StimulationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642629(1-11)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media