Abstract
Currently, wheelchair rugby athletes face the challenges of playing the sport without specifically designed sports-wear kit. A few designs and recommendations have already been proposed by researchers but none have made it to market yet. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a set of design recommendations for the development of wheelchair rugby sports-wear. This was done so that the products to be created are developed in collaboration with their potential users, responding to their particular needs and requirements. The evaluation was done through an online survey, where the athletes were presented with a visual representation of the design recommendations. The results indicate that the people questioned agree with the majority of the proposed designs and would be happy to have these improvements made to their current sports-wear. The most criticised recommendations were for the gloves, as they are the most important part of the kit, so it is important that they are adequate and allow for a good performance.
Keywords
- Sports-wear
- Wheelchair rugby
- Design recommendations
- Inclusive design
- Gloves
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the commitment of the participants of this study. This study had the financial support of FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia of Portugal under the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and UID/CTM/000264; and FEDER funds through the Competitive Factors Operational Program (COMPETE) POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007136.
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Braganca, S., Castellucci, I., Gill, S., Carvalho, M., Arezes, P. (2019). Evaluation of Design Recommendations for the Development of Wheelchair Rugby Sports-Wear. In: Di Bucchianico, G. (eds) Advances in Design for Inclusion. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 776. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94622-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94622-1_3
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