| Description |
Multiple studies have shown the importance of movement and physical exercise like dance for human wellbeing and mental health. Yet, factors influencing proprioception and body awareness in the context of exercise remain largely unexplored. This is mostly due to the lack of tools and techniques to record, manipulate and intervene on body awareness during real-time movements. To this end, we designed FUGA, a wearable device delivering continuous real-time auditory feedback on human gestures. Here we tested whether we could manipulate bodily awareness during physical exercise and dance using auditory feedback on proprioception. Following a within-subject design, we tested the effects of the device using different sounds in three populations of dancers: novice, amateurs and professionals. We found that across populations the wearable had a significant effect on the participant’s rating of feelings of bodily awareness, reward, immersion, embodiment, and self-efficacy. We discuss these results in the light of recent theories of predictive coding and active inference, emphasizing the role of action, proprioceptive and auditory sensory feedback in human behavior. Building upon these results, we suggest future studies to explore the potential of auditory proprioceptive feedback for mental health.
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