AthleteLife: Encouraging Athletes' Skills, Physical, and Mental Condition

Overview

Traditional assessment of student-athletes' physical and mental condition relies heavily on questionnaires and specialized equipment, imposing significant burden. AthleteLife is a data collection and reduction platform that leverages smartphones and wearable devices to passively and continuously track athlete condition and performance, developed collaboratively with student-athletes.

Approach

• AthleteLife (UbiComp 2024): Passive mobile and wearable sensing platform that automatically captures exercise intensity and lifestyle patterns correlated with mental and physical states, reducing assessment burden
• MiQ (UbiComp 2021): Experience sampling tool for repetitive skills training in sports using a voice user interface (VUI), enabling hands-free recording of subjective experiences during practice with minimum workload

Results

• A four-week data collection from 19 student-athletes demonstrated that wearable devices and smartphones can automatically capture exercise intensity and lifestyle patterns correlated with mental and physical states
• MiQ's voice-based interface successfully enabled hands-free subjective data collection during repetitive training without disrupting practice routines

Significance

AthleteLife demonstrates that passive sensing technologies can replace or supplement traditional burden-intensive assessment methods for student-athletes. By enabling continuous, low-burden monitoring of both physical and mental condition, the platform supports early detection of overtraining and mental health concerns in athletic populations.