• Research , Student

Asterix and Industrial Design join forces

Student athletics club Asterix and the TU/e Department of Industrial Design are going to cooperate on a long-term basis. The first real pilot will be organized around the Dommelloop (a running contest) on March 31, for which sixteen runners will be monitored for weeks - both before and during as well as after the contest. The data collected must eventually lead to better products and services for sportsmen and sportswomen, among other things.

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Aarnout Brombacher, dean of the Department of Industrial Design: “You can conduct measurements of sportsmen and women in a lab, which works quite well from a technological viewpoint, but in that setting people do not behave like they would in their natural sporting environment. In terms of social science that is useless”. This is why the university is working together with other parties within these forms of sport, such as football club PSV (including a ‘practical lab’ on training grounds De Herdgang) and Nationaal Zwemcentrum De Tongelreep.

Asterix is the first Eindhoven student sporting club with which concrete cooperation has materialized. As contest secretary Arvid van der Bruggen from Asterix indicates, it was even in 2015 that the two partners held “a sort of pre-pilot” during the Dommelloop, whereby runners were monitored during the contest by means of a wristband and were followed from the air by a drone fitted with a GoPro camera.

This year that research will be expanded and a total of sixteen athletes will be monitored, during the run as well as during their preparations and their recovery after the contest. Brombacher explains that particularly about the recovery behavior of amateur sportsmen and sportswomen “relatively little is known. Moreover, opinions among sportspeople and trainers on what you should and should not do to recover from strenuous efforts differ rather widely” .

The device that is used for the measurements, as Brombacher admits, is simply a “relatively primitive” commercial activity tracker, “for data acquisition they often prove to be quite suitable. However, the feedback from the data towards users, scientifically speaking, is rather skimpy in general. We want to add some more substance to this through our research. Besides, we find it interesting to link that information to information from other databases, for instance about the weather, in order to be able to conduct new kinds of analyses with it”.

Expectations are that three to four hundred runners will take part in the Dommelloop.

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