Research project Sports technology design and interaction
This project explores Human–Computer Interaction in the domain of sports and sports technology. We are interested in how athletes engage with interactive sport technologies – from wearables and performance data to embodied experience in high-intensity and endurance sports.
This project explores how athletes and coaches engage with digital tools, data and technology in everyday training and competition. It contributes to the research field of Human–Computer Interaction in sports (sometimes referred to as “SportsHCI”).
The project spans multiple sports and methods – from long-distance runners navigating the interplay between GPS data and bodily sensation, to competitive skiers and wax technicians reading snow through a mix of digital sensors, tactile knowledge, and collaborative judgment.
Recent work examines how generative AI is entering athletic practice as an informal training coach, and the tensions that arise between fast algorithmic guidance and the slow, embodied rhythms of endurance sport.
Together, these studies build an understanding of sports as a rich site for Human–Computer Interaction research – where data, technology and physical skill are deeply entangled. Ongoing work extends this through interviews with athletes and coaches across sports, investigating how digital technologies are used, interpreted and integrated into training and performance in practice.
Jakob Tholander. 2025. The Body as Its Own Best Sensor – An Autoethnographic Study of the Sensitivities of the Body in Long-Distance Running. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 122, 1–16.
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Jakob Tholander and Stina Nylander. 2015. Snot, Sweat, Pain, Mud, and Snow: Performance and Experience in the Use of Sports Watches. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2913–2922.
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S. Nylander and J. Tholander. 2017. Community-Based Innovation among Elite Orienteers. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 87–95.
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Stina Nylander and Jakob Tholander. 2016. Drifting off course: how sports technology can use real-time data to add new dimensions to sports. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–4.
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Florian “Floyd” Mueller, Joe Marshall, Rohit Ashok Khot, Stina Nylander and Jakob Tholander. 2016. Jogging at CHI. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1119–1122.
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