SwingBeats: An IoT Haptic Feedback Ankle Bracelet (HFAB) for Dance Education

Dance choreography is often synchronized with music. Thus, a major challenge for learning choreography is moving the correct body part to a signified rhythm in the music surrounding the beat. However, the rhythm is often more complex than a metronome. SwingBeats is a real time, haptic feedback system under research and development with the goal of helping learners of any dance style to a) focus on learning the various dance moves, steps, patterns, and dynamics without the need to keep constant track of the music’s beat pattern, and b) to condition any choreography for the dance through custom built Internet of Things (IoT) wearables.

This paper is to report on the development and preliminary success of custom Haptic Feedback Ankle Bracelets (HFABs) for the SwingBeats system. HFABs enable learning the footwork for any dance through conditioning the learner to move their feet in accordance to the choreography which follows the beat of the music. Thus HFABs condition muscle memory in the same way learning to play the piano conditions the musician’s finger muscles to anticipate each move ahead of time and play the notes in perfect harmony. Thus far, the custom HFABs have been tested with Tap dancing because this style of dancing is predominantly focused on footwork and includes a relatively small degree of freedom in the directions each foot can travel during dancing. The results are thus easily generalizable to any footwork with the addition of more haptic actuators as needed per degrees of freedom.