The Effect of an Exergame on the Shadow Play Skill Based on Muscle Memory for Young Female Participants: The Case of Forehand Drive in Table Tennis

Abstract

Learning and practicing table tennis with traditional methods is a long, tedious process and may even lead to the internalization of incorrect techniques if not supervised by a coach. To overcome these issues, the presented study proposes an exergame with the aim of enhancing young female novice players’ performance by boosting muscle memory, making practice more interesting, and decreasing the probability of faulty training. Specifically, we propose an exergame based on skeleton tracking and a virtual avatar to support correct shadow practice to learn forehand drive technique without the presence of a coach. We recruited 44 schoolgirls aged between 8 and 12 years without a background in playing table tennis and divided them into control and experimental groups. We examined their stroke skills (via the Mott-Lockhart test) and the error coefficient of their forehand drives (using a ball machine) in the pretest, post-test, and follow-up tests (10 days after the post-test). Our results showed that the experimental group had progress in the short and long term, while the control group had an improvement only in the short term. Further, the scale of improvement in the experimental group was significantly higher than in the control group. Given that the early stages of learning, particularly in girls children, are important in the internalization of individual skills in would-be athletes, this method could support promoting correct training for young females.

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Practicing the forehand drive in table tennis is supported by mirroring and correcting the movements of players using a motion-controlled avatar. This results in significantly better stroke skills compared to a baseline training technique.
Shadow practice of forehand drive: a)The proposed method. b)Intel RealSense® depth sensor. c)The traditional method.
Evaluation tests: d)Mott-Lockhart test. e)Stroke Error test.

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Publication

Forouzan Farzinnejad, Javad Rasti, Navid Khezrian & Jens Grubert. The Effect of an Exergame on the Shadow Play Skill Based on Muscle Memory for Young Female Participants: The Case of Forehand Drive in Table Tennis. In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2023 (ISMAR 2023), pp. 1152-1160. arxiv preprint | DOI | data