Pilst by Andreas Jacobsson.

The local organizers of the ECSS Congress 2015 in Malmö will endeavour to increase the number of sessions and presentations – of all kinds – within the Social Sciences & Humanities area. To that end we will utilize the blog to present some of the sessions, and later presentations, in this particular area.

The emerging technologies and infrastructures of connected devices and ubiquitous computing, commonly referred to as the Internet of Things, holds great potential for transforming sports practices: for competitive as well as recreational sports; for athletes as well as audiences; for performance as well as pleasure.

The sports technology marketplace is brimming with new, digitally enhanced products, mostly combining biometric monitoring with social media to support improved training regimes for affluent amateurs in endurance and precision sports. However, there is a wealth of possibilities waiting to be discovered at the intersection of state-of-the-art research in biomechanics and physiology within sport science, data analysis and machine learning within computer science, and embodied interaction and experience design within interaction design. This amounts to the formation of an inherently interdisciplinary research area.

Top left to bottom right: Stina Nylander, Ulf Johansson, Anders Dahlbom, Joe Marshall.

The proposed invited session pulls together three presentations from cutting edge work in this area. What they all have in common is a fascination for the dynamic interplay between human practices and technological developments, leading to explorative research approaches where innovative technology evolves in parallel with forms of training and other sports practices. The presentations are:

1. Internet of Sports Applications
   Dr. Stina Nylander, Mobile Life Vinn Excellence Center, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
2. Sport Analytics in Golf
   Dr. Ulf Johansson, University of Borås, Sweden
   Dr. Anders Dahlbom, University of Skövde, Sweden
3. Interaction in Motion
   Dr. Joe Marshall, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, UK

Contact persons for this session are:

Professor Jonas Löwgren and Dr. Andreas Jacobsson
Internet of Things and People Research Center
Malmö University