Tajadura Jimenez, A; Basia, M; Deroy, O; Fairhurst, M; Marquardt, N; Berthouze, N; (2015) As light as your footsteps: altering walking sounds to change perceived body weight, emotional state and gait. In: Begole, B and Kim, J and Woo, W and Inkpen, K, (eds.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pp. pp. 2943-2952). Association for Computing Machinery: Seoul, Republic of Korea.

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Abstract

An ever more sedentary lifestyle is a serious problem in our society. Enhancing people’s exercise adherence through technology remains an important research challenge. We propose a novel approach for a system supporting walking that draws from basic findings in neuroscience research. Our shoe-based prototype senses a person’s footsteps and alters in real-time the frequency spectra of the sound they produce while walking. The resulting sounds are consistent with those produced by either a lighter or heavier body. Our user study showed that modified walking sounds change one’s own perceived body weight and lead to a related gait pattern. In particular, augmenting the high frequencies of the sound leads to the perception of having a thinner body and enhances the motivation for physical activity inducing a more dynamic swing and a shorter heel strike. We here discuss the opportunities and the questions our findings open.

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