Abstract
BackgroundSeveral countries encourage the practice of football for rehabilitation and social inclusion purposes. For visually impaired people, football is purely sound-based, where the ball and the players are constantly emitting sounds for localization purposes in the field. However, the task of shooting the ball requires of a non-visually impaired extra person, behind the goal (known as caller), whom is punching the four corner of such goal to help the athletes. The presence of the caller restricts the self-sufficiency of the players. This work addresses such problem, by presenting a goal for visually impaired players with the aim of enhancing their self-sufficiency.Materials and methodsThe electronic goal is designed with four functionalities for training purposes, by returning sound-based feedback of its position and the places where the ball has impacted. The system is validated with seven volunteers from Chilean Football Soccer National Team. A questionnaire was answered by the players before and after the tests to statically validate the proposed device.ResultsThe presented system is portable and designed following a modular criterion suitable for visually impaired people self-assembling. From a test of 350 shootings, the electronic goal showed to enhance the shooting assertiveness from 82 to 92%, and the accuracy from 20 to 56% compared to the traditional caller.ConclusionsThe electronic goal showed to enhance the self-sufficiency of athletes, by improving their assertiveness in shooting training. Nevertheless, and according to the responses to the questionnaires, the system needs improvements in its portability and handling.
Highlights
Several countries encourage the practice of football for rehabilitation and social inclusion purposes
From a test of 350 shootings, the electronic goal showed to enhance the shooting assertiveness from 82 to 92%, and the accuracy from 20 to 56% compared to the traditional caller
The electronic goal showed to enhance the self-sufficiency of athletes, by improving their assertiveness in shooting training
Summary
The previous six constraints serve as guidelines for the electronic goal designing process as shown following:. The solution shown in this work is based on the design of a modular and portable electronic goal that can be seen as a sensor network: each module has accelerometers to sense the impact, a speaker to emit a sound and it was built to resist ball impacts. Such design fulfils the six constraints as will be shown . As stated, following the recommendations given the football soccer trainers, the electronic goal was built according a grid-based system of 12 cells, in 4 columns of 3 cells. The questionnaire was aimed at validating the proof of concept proposed in this work
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