Blind athletes help students to create a wearable coaching aid

The work is part of the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) masters programme run jointly by Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.

As part of the course, mining company Rio Tinto has launched a ‘Sports Innovation Challenge’ for new paralympic opportunities, ranging from equipment through to radical new sporting events and competition models.

The teams had the chance to do research and work with paralympians such as blind triathlete Iain Dawson.

‘As a visually impaired person, you don’t develop the same kind of kinaesthetic awareness — so we began with how you can rebuild body awareness and how you can actually have a feeling of where your limbs are in space, if you lost your sight, for instance,’ said IDE student Benedict Copping.

Noting that the vast majority of sighted athletes use coaching demonstrations or video-analysis techniques to perfect complex motion skills, Copping’s team wanted to find a way for blind athletes to similarly benefit.