Beyond Adaptive Sports: Challenges & Opportunities to Improve Accessibility and Analytics
Rushil Khurana, Ashley Wang, Patrick Carrington · 2021 · ASSETS '21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3441852.3471223
Summary
While sports data analytics has become a multi-billion dollar industry transforming training, strategy, and refereeing in able-bodied sports, adaptive sports have been largely left behind by this technological revolution. Khurana et al. interviewed 18 participants across six adaptive sports — wheelchair basketball, wheelchair rugby, wheelchair tennis, para powerlifting, blind hockey, and beepball (blind baseball) — including athletes, coaches, high-performance managers, a data analyst, and a wheelchair manufacturer. The interviews explored current practices, technological and analytical needs, and the role of equipment in each sport. The researchers analyzed findings both across all sports (identifying common challenges) and within three groupings based on the nature of the disability and equipment demands: blind sports (blind hockey and beepball), wheelchair-based sports (wheelchair basketball, rugby, and tennis), and adaptive sports with high equipment requirements (blind hockey, beepball, wheelchair tennis, and para powerlifting). The study reveals that before adaptive sports can benefit from advanced analytics, they must first address more fundamental challenges around accessibility, funding, equipment, and organizational infrastructure that able-bodied sports resolved long ago.
Key findings
Three cross-cutting challenges affect all adaptive sports. First, severe financial limitations and resource constraints: more than half the sports studied are underfunded, rely on volunteers, and athletes often pay for their own travel and accommodations even at the national competitive level. Second, a critical lack of adaptive sports data: current fitness trackers cannot accurately track wheelchair pushes or movements, and research in sports technology overwhelmingly focuses on able-bodied athletes, leaving no datasets or algorithms suited to adaptive sports. Third, heavy reliance on video for analytics, but with significant barriers — automated video analytics tools use kinematic models designed for able-bodied movement, and adaptive sports organizations lack the infrastructure and staff to manually tag footage. For blind sports specifically, the study found three key issues: fragile sound-based adaptive equipment (hockey pucks with ball bearings that break within hours, wired bases in beepball that need constant repair), the need for accessible training aids since visual coaching tools don't work for blind athletes, and poor communication tools (coaches use primitive tactile boards with raised wooden sticks to convey strategies). For wheelchair sports, key themes were the need for performance tracking analytics (push mechanics, wheel position, lean tendencies) and the costly, ad-hoc process of wheelchair customization that currently relies on expert intuition rather than data. The study identifies four concrete opportunities: instrumenting wheelchairs with sensors to track chair health and performance, building smart equipment (sensor-embedded barbells, smart hockey sticks), developing accessible training aids, and leveraging technology for outreach and recruitment.
Relevance
This paper fills an important gap by documenting the technological inequality between adaptive and able-bodied sports, showing that the challenges go far beyond simply adapting existing analytics tools. The practical implications are significant: fitness tracker manufacturers should develop algorithms that recognize wheelchair pushes and adaptive movements; sports technology companies should consider the adaptive sports market when designing sensing platforms; and the HCI/accessibility research community should prioritize building datasets and algorithms specific to adaptive sports movements. The finding that basic equipment accessibility (durable sound-emitting pucks, reliable wired bases) remains unsolved highlights how far adaptive sports technology lags behind. For accessibility practitioners more broadly, this research demonstrates that inclusion in physical activity and sport — a domain critical for health, community, and quality of life — requires purpose-built technology, not afterthought adaptations of able-bodied tools. The study also reveals how financial and resource constraints create a vicious cycle that limits the growth, visibility, and technological advancement of adaptive sports.
Tags: adaptive sports · Paralympic · wheelchair sports · blind sports · sports analytics · wearable technology · assistive technology · physical activity