HCI, Disability and Sport: A Literature Review

Equitable access to sport for disabled people remains challenging, and technology is often viewed as a way of addressing barriers. However, little is known about how disability is approached in such research and the purpose of sport that is afforded to disabled people. We address this issue in a review of 60 publications in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. We leverage Template Analysis in combination with Mueller and Young’s lenses on virtues of sport to also explore the experiential side of sports technology for disabled people. Our results are threefold: (1) We show that disability shifts the intended purpose of sports technology away from leisure to health, and that technologies such as exergames are viewed as an opportunity to replace real-world sport to address barriers and increase motivation. (2) We highlight that in(ter)dependence plays a strong role in technology development, but that disabled people are not extensively involved in research. (3) We show that virtues beyond health as per Mueller and Young do apply to existing work, but that value frameworks need to be re-worked in the context of disability, placing a stronger emphasis on sport as leisure, and the enriching role that technology can play.