Investigating the Integration of Hand-Held Haptic Devices in Daily Work Activities: The Case of a Tennis Coaching Assistant on iPhone

摘要

This paper investigates the integration of hand-held haptic devices in daily work activities in the form of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones that help professionals perform their tasks in a more effective way. Such devices provide significant advantages of high portability, availability and familiarity, since their users already use them as mobile phones. The aforementioned issues will be studied in the context of a Tennis Coaching Assistant, an application running on an iPhone that provides management and scheduling capabilities for tennis trainers and allows a comprehensive overview of the execution of on-court drills and coaching programs. The paper describes the usability evaluation methodology applied and documents the results focusing on interaction difficulties and practical obstacles reported by the users as well as suggestions for future versions of the application, which generally received quite positive feedback.