soniFRED: Sonification of Biomechanical Exercise Data

The soniFRED project is a piece of collaborative research between Northumbria University’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences and the Aerospace Medicine and Rehabilitation Lab.

We spent a week at the Centre for Life testing different information presentation methods to help people with low back pain exercise most effectively with the Functional Re-adaptive Exercise Device (FRED). Combinations of visual and auditory feedback (including two sonification schemes) were given to participants and the data will be analysed to see what ways of giving the users feedback about how they are using the machine lead to improved performance.

You can get a sense of what we were doing by watching this short video.