Effects of vibrotactile feedback on yoga practice

Abstract

Participating in physical exercise using remote platforms is challenging for people with vision impairment due to their lack of vision. Thus, there is a need to provide nonvisual feedback to this population to improve the performance and safety of remote exercise. In this study, the effects of different nonvisual types of feedback (verbal, vibrotactile, and combined verbal and vibrotactile) for movement correction were tested with 22 participants with normal vision to investigate the feasibility of the feedback system and pilot tested with four participants with impaired vision. The study with normal-vision participants found that nonvisual feedback successfully corrected an additional 11.2% of movements compared to the no-feedback condition. Vibrotactile feedback was the most time-efficient among other types of feedback in correcting poses. Participants with normal vision rated multimodal feedback as the most strongly preferred modality. In a pilot test, participants with impaired vision also showed a similar trend. Overall, the study found providing vibrotactile (or multimodal) feedback during physical exercise to be an effective way of improving exercise performance. Implications for future training platform development with vibrotactile or multimodal feedback for people with impaired vision are discussed.