Many years ago, I studied sports science.
Afterward, I worked for almost 10 years as a researcher in the field of sports science.
When asked what my profession is or what I did in the past, I tell people that I was a sports scientist.
Very often, I can immediately see by the expression on people’s faces that they can’t imagine what that means.
The confusion usually increases when I tell people that I am not a teacher for sports.
My colleagues, who I work with today in software engineering, often make fun of me as the guy who only wears sweatpants.
It’s all in good fun, but still, the feeling of people not understanding what sports science is haunts me.
So, here’s a series I want to start to shed light on what is also part of sports science.
This image above shows a setup for an experiment I did with colleagues to research how people hand over an object to others (imagine handing someone a bottle of water) under different experimental conditions. This was research aimed at gaining a better understanding of human interaction, with the ultimate goal of applying these findings to human-robot interaction.
But let’s take a closer look at what’s in the image. We see a computer running software developed by me in Matlab to control the experiment. This software also controls the motion cameras, which you can see on the stands. These cameras are designed to track the little grey spheres worn by participants, which are often used in animated movies to track movement. In this case, they were used to track the movement of the object on the desk.
It’s the object the participants had to hand over to each other.
It consists of four force sensors to measure the forces applied during interaction, as well as to provide insights into the duration and timing of contact.
These sensors are also controlled by the software.
The object was originally created during a student project, where students worked on it for a full semester under the supervision of a colleague and me.
The data produced by this setup was processed and analyzed using custom Python software.
In the analysis, a method created and published by a team of scientists from our department was applied.
Ultimately, all of this led to a publication in Nature’s journal Scientific Reports.
I’m not saying that all of sports science is like this. This is just a small part of it, but probably one of the least imagined parts when people hear the term “sports science.”
So, stay tuned for more posts like this. I already have more ideas in mind.
See you!