Head in the game | EurekAlert! Scientific news

Tsukuba, Japan – Researchers from Tsukuba University’s Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences studied how blind and blind players monitored an incoming noisy ball. They found that blind players employed more head downward rotation when trapping the rolling ball, compared to blindfolded sighted volunteers. This work can help explain the methods that visually impaired people use to complete daily tasks, as well as assist in creating new smart assistant devices.

Blind football is a sport that can be played by anyone, regardless of visual skills. With the exception of the goalkeepers, players are blindfolded during play and can follow the position of the ball using the sounds it makes. To better understand how visually impaired players are able to receive and control the ball, scientists from the University of Tsukuba recruited both experienced blind football players and sighted non-athlete volunteers. A system of ten cameras was used to track the three-dimensional position of the reflective markers attached to the body of each test subject. Each participant’s task was to trap an incoming rolling ball with his right foot while blindfolded.

Experienced blind footballers showed a wider downward head rotation angle, as well as better overall performance, than sighted non-athletes. However, no significant differences were found in horizontal rotation of the head or trunk. This indicates that blind footballers can more closely match the movement of their head with the movement of the approaching ball.

“Our study suggests that blind footballers are better at keeping the ball in a consistent egocentric direction than the head throughout the capture process,” says senior author Professor Masahiro Kokubu.

It is known that blind people can have higher hearing than sighted people, especially due to sound localization. ‘Our results are consistent with previous findings that practice improves the ability to track sounds even in blind individuals who already do better than sighted people in this task,’ explains Professor Kokubu. These findings also suggest that blind footballers’ strategy for accurately locating a ball is similar to the way high-level baseball batters turn their heads. The results of this project could lead to improved smart devices that use these same techniques to assist visually impaired people.

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The work is published in Scientific reports such as “Blind footballers direct their heads towards an approaching ball during ball entrapment” (DOI: 10.1038 / s41598-020-77049-3)