Watching Your Back While Riding Your Bike

This paper presents our early exploratory work investigating if, and how motorbike riders would engage with visual cues on lower-back posture to adjust their body posture while riding, and in turn prevent lower back injuries due to physical stress. The design exploration reported is part of a larger series of investigations looking into the broader question of integrating measures for preventive self-care with existing everyday activities (e.g. daily motorcycle commute) by means of digital technology. We are guided by the concept of embodied self-monitoring grounded in theories on the embodied and circumstantial nature of human actions, a construct previously used to guide design oriented research in the domain of out-of-clinic physical rehabilitation. We follow a research-through-design approach with the sketching of user experience as our primary mode of inquiry, as we look to expand opportunities for interaction design in the domain of preventive self-care. We report on the outcome of in-situ enactments performed by four motorbike riders as co-explorers engaging with our interactive soft&hardware sketches while actually riding in traffic. In-situ enactments and follow-up interviews with the riders encourage us to (a) further elaborate our interactive sketches for motorbike commuting, and (b) investigate more broadly the design of digital technology in support of preventive self-care as an integrated part of mundane activities such as, in the case at hand, the daily motorcycle commute.