Patrick Mayerhofer

Wearables Course Workshop and Other Engagements

The student engagement award allowed me to visit the department of Sports Engineering at the Chemnitz University of Technology. During the trip, the main goal was to learn more about the work being done by the Sports Engineering group in Chemnitz, and to present and gather feedback on my projects . A main topic was the open-source remote wearables course that I co-developed at Simon Fraser University. The visit gave me a chance to present all the resources from this course, and provide the Sports Engineering department with an overview on how to best utilize on these resources for their own courses in Chemnitz. We had a great workshop, where participants also got some hands-on experience of the course.

For myself, I got some great feedback for the course, and for their department, they learned something that might potentially be integrated into their curriculum in one way or another. Additionally, I got to see the various research that they are currently doing in their department. I was particularly interested into their wearable sensor research that they are doing as part of a capstone project called hybrid-societies. Hybrid-societies is a collaboration of multiple departments at the Chemnitz University of Technology. The goal is to use the interaction of humans and machines to create a better life and lifestyle. The Sports Engineering department’s projects are centered around measuring human movements and giving accurate environmental information and feedback to humans. Since my own PhD work is centered around measuring the performance of athletes and providing them with automatic and objective feedback, I was excited about their work. Lastly, I got a chance to see the town Chemnitz and its surroundings, such as the “Sächsische Schweiz”, where we got to go on a hike close to the Czeck border. I hope that the connections that we built during this week can be utilized in future collaborations and projects.