Ghost - London 2012 Olympics
A Prototype Personal Training Instrument designed for Olympic and Para-Olympic Athlete’s, allowing them to download and train on their or another athlete’s ‘Ghost’.
THE STORY
What a blind person needs is not a teacher, but another self. – Helen Keller
In the world of Paralympic swimming, gold medals can be decided by margins as tiny as a fingernail. Swimmers practice to refine and polish their stroke mechanics continuously in order to shave off precious milliseconds from their times. However, it is vision that allows us to imitate and refine the minute changes in muscular movements, and as such, having a severe visual impairment can make it difficult to correct and perfect these complex motion skills. Paralympic athletes depend on physical interaction and auditory feedback from their coach to refine their kinesthetic movements.
THE DEVICE
Our device works with this principle to provide the athlete with an instant feedback via both vibration and aural senses, for technique improvement in conjunction with or in the absence of the coach. The device works by defining key points in the stroke–known as “gateways”–to which the athlete is then prompted toward when completing the full stroke. When passing through a point, the device will inform the athlete of what types of motion will be nessecary to achieve the next gateway. With this, a much cleaner and repeatable stroke is achieved.
PROTOTYPE
