With a long history of over 1000 years, the shuttle-kick activity has been considered as a popular leisure fitness in many Asian countries. Similar to hacky sack, it requires motor skills in coordinating feet, knees, hips, and torso to keep a shuttlecock in the air. In this project, ShuttleKicker+ was designed as a smart shuttlecock equipped with sensors to track the progress of the activity and send the sensed data to a software for feedback and interactions.

In the first iteration, ShuttleKicker+ was implemented with audio-visual feedback according to the progress of the activity. Moreover, it provides a set of social interfaces based on persuasive mechanisms to facilitate teamwork, competition, and social recognition.

In the second iteration, we mainly looked into audio-based augmentation to the shuttle-kick activity. We mapped a set of gamified sound effects to the activity progress for a responsive and game-like exercise experience.

Besides testing with office workers as a means of fitness-boosting breaks, ShuttleKicker+ has also been evaluated with teenagers for improving their motivations in participating PE class. See the detail via the video below.