Vibrotactile Feedback for Training Tempo and Stroke Length in Golf Putting

Traditionally, to learn a sport effectively, people receive feedback from an expert, such as an instructor. However, personal instructors are not only expensive, but the demand for training is also larger than the number of instructors available. As an alternative to traditional instruction, we are developing a sports training system to provide multimodal feedback to users based on their performance and environment information. The feedback is based on both the user’s performance and the motion of expert athletes, enabling users to train effectively. Initially, we chose Golf as a case study to implement this system. In this paper, we introduce an approach to train putting tempo and stroke length using vibrotactile feedback in order to enable users to train their putting ability consistently. Using the proposed vibrotactile cues, users were able to perform putts with tempos close to the ones provided by the vibrotactile cues. Furthermore, they were able to control the length of the backswing stroke following the proposed vibrotactile cues. We believe the proposed framework can be used to train the basic skills of putting effectively.