📅 Proposed Period: Sep 2026 – Early 2027 (negotiable)

Designing Assistive Sports Technologies for Goalball Athletes

Gyeongdeok Kim

PhD Student @ GIST, South Korea

✉ kimkunduk@gm.gist.ac.kr HCI & Inclusive Design Researcher

1. Executive Summary

This work investigates the training needs of visually impaired goalball athletes and examines the design space of feedback systems that support training. Leveraging participatory design, it aims to enable both independent practice and effective athlete–coach interaction through real-time, accessible feedback aligned with international competitive standards.

2. Background & Motivation

👥

High Dependency

Athletes rely heavily on coaches for verbal feedback, which limits the opportunity for personalized, spontaneous improvement.

🚫

Lack of Autonomy

Current training lacks real-time, non-visual performance data, making independent practice nearly impossible for VI players.

💡

Design Opportunity

Translating spatial dynamics into haptic/audio feedback without violating silent-play regulations remains an open challenge.

3. Prior Work & Research Gaps

Scientific Basis

Training Fundamentals

Prior statistical studies by Link et al. [5] and Fujita et al. [6] established that ball trajectory and sector targeting are vital factors for competitive success.

Technical Status

Existing Limitations

  • Virtual Barriers [1]: Systems like Goalbaural are often limited to VR/AR, lacking physical ball interaction.
  • Regulation Conflict [2, 3]: Tools like L-Ball or mechanical ball launchers introduce noise violating silent-play norms.
Proposed Goal

Addressing Practical Needs

Revalidating prior metrics to build a physical-court-based framework that provides real-time feedback while remaining regulation-compliant.

4. Proposed Research Plan

Phase 1

Expanding Context to a Global Perspective

Foundation (South Korea) On-going Target: CHI '27

Building upon detailed requirements gathered from the South Korean goalball community. This stage provides deep insight into competitive dynamics and specific accessibility barriers encountered by professional athletes.

Global Connection (United States) Target: ASSETS '28

Connecting Korean findings with the US-based goalball ecosystem. By engaging with athletes at the US, the research will synthesize international training needs and establish a universal design framework that transcends regional borders.

Phase 2

Collaborative Design Synthesis

Target: CHI '28

Autonomous Interaction Models

Integrating fabrication expertise to develop wearable or court-integrated sensors that provide independent, real-time auditory/haptic feedback.

Regulation-Compliant Framework

Formalizing a design space that balances rich multimodal performance data with the 'silent-play' requirements of international competition.

5. Methodology of the Current Phase

📕 Qualitative Research Approach [10]

Interviews and Focus Groups

We use semi-structured interviews and, where useful, focus groups to understand real training practices from the perspectives of key stakeholders. Participants will include athletes and coaches across amateur, elite, and national-team contexts, so the study can capture both everyday constraints and high-performance demands.

Open Coding to Thematic Analysis

After transcription, each coder begins with open coding to identify meaningful concepts from the data. The team then compares and refines codes into a shared framework, which supports thematic analysis for deriving grounded findings, design requirements, and next-step opportunities.

🔍 Examples

What is the coding?

Example diagram showing the transition from raw interview data to open codes and then to an axial code.

Code structure

Hierarchical code structure example showing multiple levels of categories and subcodes.
These cases serve as concrete examples of how interview-driven accessibility research can lead to publishable CHI or ASSETS outcomes [11-16].

6. References

  1. Miura, Takahiro, et al. "Goalbaural: A training application for goalball-related aural sense." Proceedings of the 9th Augmented Human International Conference. 2018.
  2. Pratiwi, Febriana, et al. "L-Ball: Designing a novel sports electronic audio ball for visual impairment student." Annals of Applied Sport Science 8.4 (2020): 0-0.
  3. Brucker, Michael, et al. "Goalball Launcher." Design Engineering Technology Project Poster, Trine University.
  4. Polsorn, Kanlapruk, et al. "The Developments of Goalball Famous Visually Impaired Blind Athletes' Agility Using Smart Ladder Drill Prototype." International Journal of Health Sciences 6.S2 (2022): 184-202.
  5. Link, Daniel, and Christoph Weber. "Finding the gap: An empirical study of the most effective shots in elite goalball." PLOS ONE 13.4 (2018): e0196679.
  6. Fujita, Rafael, Otavio Furtado, and Marcio Morato. "Ball trajectories and probability of scoring a goal in elite male goalball throws." European Journal of Adapted Physical Activity 14.1 (2021).
  7. Lazar, Jonathan, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and Harry Hochheiser. Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufmann, 2017.
  8. Kim, Gyeongdeok, Chungman Lim, and Gunhyuk Park. "I-Scratch: Independent Slide Creation With Auditory Comment and Haptic Interface for the Blind and Visually Impaired." Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2025.
  9. Kim, Gyeongdeok, et al. "I-VAMOS: Independent Voting with Accessible Multimodal Offline System for Visually Impaired Users." Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2026.
  10. Lazar, Jonathan, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and Harry Hochheiser. "Research methods in human-computer interaction." Morgan Kaufmann. 2017.
  11. Li, Franklin Mingzhe, et al. "Non-visual cooking: exploring practices and challenges of meal preparation by people with visual impairments." Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 2021.
  12. Li, Franklin Mingzhe, et al. "A Recipe for Success? Exploring Strategies for Improving Non-Visual Access to Cooking Instructions." Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 2024.
  13. Sharma, Tanusree, et al. "Disability-first design and creation of a dataset showing private visual information collected with people who are blind." Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023.
  14. Zhang, Lotus, et al. "Exploring interactive sound design for auditory websites." Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2022.
  15. Li, Franklin Mingzhe, et al. "Understanding visual arts experiences of blind people." Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023.
  16. Ran, Zihe, et al. "How users who are blind or low vision play mobile games: Perceptions, challenges, and strategies." Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2025.