Smart Sport Assistance

Smart Sport Assistance (SSA) for visually impaired children

Children with disabilities often encounter barriers in physical education. Students with visual impairments in particular find lessons often to be non-inclusive. This can lead to disappointment and exclusion. These experiences can have a long-term impact and reduce motivation to engage in physical activity.

The “Smart Sport Assistance” project aimed to make it easier for children and young people with visual impairments to participate in sports. Based on an open innovation approach, students with and without visual impairments worked together under scientific guidance to develop technical assistance systems. They identified barriers to participation and needs, accompanied by scientific research, and tested developed prototypes iteratively in interactive formats. This resulted in practical, user-oriented solutions.

A central concern of the project was to promote awareness and empathy. Students without visual impairments explored the perspectives of their classmates. For long-term support, an “awareness box” was developed based on qualitative data from interviews, workshops, and trials, which includes technical aids and teaching materials for schools and teacher training.

The results show that participation in physical education is not achieved through formal accessibility alone, but depends on subjective opportunities for action, orientation security, and independent participation. Visually dominated teaching settings often reproduce implicit norms of normality, which can cause frustration for blind and visually impaired students. Targeted assistance and feedback systems, on the other hand, open up alternative sensory access and enable resource-oriented forms of participation. The project thus contributes to a broader understanding of participation in sports education.

On a methodological level, the project demonstrates the innovative value of participatory development processes. The involvement of blind and visually impaired students in needs assessment, testing, and further development led to solutions that differ significantly from purely technically motivated approaches. The interaction between technical functionality, didactic requirements, and subjective user experiences is crucial for practical applicability. At the same time, the project highlights the potential of citizen science approaches as a framework for co-creative innovation processes in a school context.

Close collaboration, continuous exchange, and the joint development and implementation of ideas with the students and teachers of the Austrian Federal Institute for the Blind were crucial to the success of the project. The technical school partners made a significant contribution to the development of the prototypes for the assistance systems; without their great commitment, the implementation of the project would not have been possible. The AHS school partner and the citizen scientists involved also contributed a valuable outside perspective to the project work.

This project is already completed.