Design and implementation of an integrative system for configurable exergames targeting the senior population

Exergames have been proposed as a solution for the promotion of physical activity in the senior population. The diversity of needs and limitations of the target users demand that the exergaming systems allow the configuration and adjustment of game parameters according to each user profile. Such systems are ideal to use in nursing homes, senior gymnasiums, or even rehabilitation centers. Health and sports professionals are then the main interacting users with the interface of such exergaming systems. Configuration can be difficult and time-consuming when considering complex systems with a significant amount of parameter choices. Since professionals working on such places already have time constraints, if they face long-time configuration of these systems they might give up of using them. Therefore, there is an evident need for systems that assist professionals in two ways. First, providing management support for training sessions and plans with exergames. Second, providing automatic decision-making processes that assist in game selection and parameters configuration to fit the user needs. The acceptance and effectiveness of such systems can only be achieved if the main prospective interactors with the system are involved in the development process so that the system can fulfill the users’ needs and expectations. This thesis reports on the design, implementation, and usability evaluation of an integrative system using some of the most-known human-centric techniques, such as interviews, card sorting, and paper prototyping. Results of a usability study of the UI and the main functionalities of the system showed a considerable acceptance and interest by the professionals. The usability study revealed to be a great resource to find aspects of the system that should be further considered for improvement in future iterations. Furthermore, the high results of the USE (Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of use) questionnaire confirm that this system is a promising tool that sports professionals may be willing to use in their daily practice.A literatura suporta que os exergames, ou jogos que requerem exercício físico, constituem uma opção válida para promoção da atividade física na população idosa. A diversidade de necessidades e limitações do público-alvo exige que estes exergames sejam configuráveis de forma a permitir ajustar os parâmetros do jogo de acordo com o perfil de cada indivíduo. Estes sistemas personalizáveis são ideais para a utilização em lares, centros de dia, ginásios específicos para idosos ou até mesmo em centros de reabilitação. Os profissionais de saúde e de desporto são, assim, os principais utilizadores a definir as configurações destes exergames. Neste contexto, escolher as definições ideais para cada perfil pode ser um processo difícil e demorado, tendo em conta que a interface destes sistemas apresenta normalmente uma quantidade significativa de opções. Considerando que estes profissionais já têm constrangimentos de tempo na sua prática diária, se forem confrontados com uma interação longa e complexa com estes sistemas, podem acabar por desistir de usá-los. Neste sentido, existe uma clara necessidade de sistemas que auxiliem os profissionais a incluir os exergames na sua prática diária com a população idosa. Este sistema deverá assistir os profissionais de duas maneiras. Primeiro, que permita gerir sessões e planos de treino com os exergames. Segundo, que disponibilize processos de decisão automáticos de forma a auxiliar na escolha dos jogos, bem como nas configurações ideais para cada perfil de utilizador. A aceitação e a eficácia destes sistemas podem apenas ser alcançadas se os profissionais forem envolvidos no processo de desenvolvimento desde o início. Tal permitirá que este possa ser desenhado tendo em conta as suas necessidades e expectativas. Esta dissertação descreve as técnicas aplicadas no desenho, implementação e avaliação de um sistema integrativo para exergames, com base em algumas técnicas bem conhecidas na área de interação homemmáquina, como por exemplo entrevistas, card sorting e prototipagem em papel. Resultados de um estudo de usabilidade da interface do sistema integrativo demonstraram uma considerável aceitação e interesse por parte dos profissionais. O estudo de usabilidade revelou ser um bom recurso para encontrar aspetos do sistema que devem ser considerados para melhoramento em futuras iterações. Além disso, os resultados promissores do questionário USE (Utilidade, satisfação e facilidade de uso) confirmam que os profissionais poderão estar interessados em usar este sistema na sua prática diária

Natural User Interfaces in the Motor Development of Disabled Children

Natural User Interfaces have been widely used in the past few years in an ever growing range of contexts, including activities relying in body motion tracking, with an overall positive outcome. This thesis goals were to understand how to address a framework based upon body tracking devices and aimed at assisting children with motor impairments, as well as understanding what positive contribute it could deliver for their rehabilitation process.A state of the art study regarding the most relevant devices and frameworks is addressed, and the most beneficial combination of these technologies is selected and detailed, including the emerged benefits and constraints. This enabled a better understanding of the motor disorders that could take advantage of the technological specifications, as well as the types of exercise appropriate for this context. The collaboration of Occupational Therapists in this process was significant in providing information that helped defining the framework's targeting and the exercises more commonly addressed in rehabilitation sessions.A framework was developed that enabled to collect results based upon mimicking the moves of a previously recorded exercise. The architecture, design and implementation processes were done on an iterative and incremental basis, and were influenced by the technological exploration and targeting analysis results, all of these thoroughly described in the document. The results obtained by the tests conducted during the validation process evidence that the data collected regarding the user performance is related with their impairment condition and denote certain motor patterns of the disorder. However, a few detection and tracking issues in more complex exercises affected the relevance of the collected data, thus indicating that the device selected for this project can be applied in a real context to assist in rehabilitation sessions, but requiring additional evaluation metrics to support the obtained results

AIoTES: Setting the principles for semantic interoperable and modern IoT-enabled reference architecture for Active and Healthy Ageing ecosystems

[EN] The average life expectancy of the world's population is increasing and the healthcare systems sooner than later will be compromised by its reduced capacity and its highly economic cost; in addition, the age distribution of the population is leading towards the older spectrum. This trend will lead to immeasurable and unexpected economic problems and social changes. In order to face up this challenge and complex economic and social problem, it is necessary to rely on the appropriate digital tools and technological infrastructures for ensuring that the elderly are properly cared in their everyday living environments and they can live independently for longer. This article presents ACTIVAGE IoT Ecosystem Suite (AIoTES), a concrete reference architecture and its implementation process that addresses these issues and that was designed within the first European Large Scale Pilot, ACTIVAGE, a H2020 funded project by the European Commission with the objective of creating sustainable ecosystems for Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) based on Internet of Things and big data technologies. AIoTES offers platform level semantic interoperability, with security and privacy, as well as Big Data and Ecosystem tools. AIoTES enables and promotes the creation, exchange and adoption of crossplatform services and applications for AHA. The number of existing AHA services and solutions are quite large, especially when state-of-the-art technology is introduced, however a concrete architecture such as AIoTES gains more importance and relevance by providing a vision for establishing a complete ecosystem, that looks for supporting a larger variety of AHA services, rather than claiming to be a unique solution for all the AHA domain problems. AIoTES has been successfully validated by testing all of its components, individually, integrated, and in real-world environments with 4345 direct users. Each validation is contextualized in 11 Deployment Sites (DS) with 13 Validation Scenarios covering the heterogeneity of the AHA-IoT needs. These results also show a clear path for improvement, as well as the importance for standardization efforts in the ever-evolving AHA-IoT domain.We thank to all the people who have participated in the development and validation of AIoTES. This work has been developed under the framework of the ACTIVAGE project. The project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732679.Valero-López, CI.; Medrano-Gil, A.; González-Usach, R.; Julián-Seguí, M.; Fico, G.; Arredondo, MT.; Stavropoulos, TG.... (2021). AIoTES: Setting the principles for semantic interoperable and modern IoT-enabled reference architecture for Active and Healthy Ageing ecosystems. Computer Communications. 177:96-111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2021.06.0109611117

DESIGNING BETTER EXERGAMES: APPLICATION OF FLOW CONCEPTS AND THE FITT PRINCIPLE TO FULL BODY EXERTION VIDEO GAMES AND FLEXIBLE CHALLENGE SYSTEMS

Exercise video games have a recognized potential for widespread use as tools for effective exercise. Current exergames do not consistently strike a successful balance between the “fun gameplay” and “effective exercise” aspects of the ideal exergame. Our research into the design of better exergames applies existing gameflow research and established exercise guidelines, such as those published by the American College of Sports Medicine, to a collection of four custom exergames: Astrojumper, Washboard, Sweet Harvest and Legerdemain implement full-body motion mechanics that support different types of exercise, and vary in intended duration of play, game complexity, and level of physical challenge. Each game also implements a difficulty adjustment system that detects player performance from in-game data and dynamically adjusts game difficulty, in order to balance between a player’s fitness level and the physical challenge presented by the game. We have evaluated the games produced by our design approach through a series of user studies on players’ physiological and psychological responses to gameplay, finding that balance between challenge types (cognitive or physical) is an important consideration along with challenge-skill balance, and further, that game mechanics able to support creativity of movement are an effective means of bridging between gameplay and exercise in order to improve the player experience

Working in Australia's digital games industry

The Working in Australia’s Digital Games Industry: A Consolidation Report is the outcome of a comprehensive study on the games industry in Australia by Dr Sandra Haukka from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) based at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. The study responds to concerns that Australia’s games industry would not reach its full potential due to a lack of local, highly skilled staff, and a lack of appropriately trained graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills. This is the first of two reports produced with the support of the Games Developers’ Association of Australia. Over coming months researchers will develop a future skills strategy report for the industry

Accessible Integration of Physiological Adaptation in Human-Robot Interaction

Technological advancements in creating and commercializing novel unobtrusive wearable physiological sensors have generated new opportunities to develop adaptive human-robot interaction (HRI). Detecting complex human states such as engagement and stress when interacting with social agents could bring numerous advantages to creating meaningful interactive experiences. Bodily signals have classically been used for post-interaction analysis in HRI. Despite this, real-time measurements of autonomic responses have been used in other research domains to develop physiologically adaptive systems with great success; increasing user-experience, task performance, and reducing cognitive workload. This thesis presents the HRI Physio Lib, a conceptual framework, and open-source software library to facilitate the development of physiologically adaptive HRI scenarios. Both the framework and architecture of the library are described in-depth, along with descriptions of additional software tools that were developed to make the inclusion of physiological signals easier for robotics frameworks. The framework is structured around four main components for designing physiologically adaptive experimental scenarios: signal acquisition, processing and analysis; social robot and communication; and scenario and adaptation. Open-source software tools have been developed to assist in the individual creation of each described component. To showcase our framework and test the software library, we developed, as a proof-of-concept, a simple scenario revolving around a physiologically aware exercise coach, that modulates the speed and intensity of the activity to promote an effective cardiorespiratory exercise. We employed the socially assistive QT robot for our exercise scenario, as it provides a comprehensive ROS interface, making prototyping of behavioral responses fast and simple. Our exercise routine was designed following guidelines by the American College of Sports Medicine. We describe our physiologically adaptive algorithm and propose an alternative second one with stochastic elements. Finally, a discussion about other HRI domains where the addition of a physiologically adaptive mechanism could result in novel advances in interaction quality is provided as future extensions for this work. From the literature, we identified improving engagement, providing deeper social connections, health care scenarios, and also applications for self-driving vehicles as promising avenues for future research where a physiologically adaptive social robot could improve user experience

Interface caligráfica de escrita no ar

Na atualidade, está a emergir um novo paradigma de interação, designado por Natural User Interface (NUI) para reconhecimento de gestos produzidos com o corpo do utilizador. O dispositivo de interação Microsoft Kinect foi inicialmente concebido para controlo de videojogos, para a consola Xbox360. Este dispositivo demonstra ser uma aposta viável para explorar outras áreas, como a do apoio ao processo de ensino e de aprendizagem para crianças do ensino básico. O protótipo desenvolvido visa definir um modo de interação baseado no desenho de letras no ar, e realizar a interpretação dos símbolos desenhados, usando os reconhecedores de padrões Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA), Support Vector Machines (SVM) e $N. O desenvolvimento deste projeto baseou-se no estudo dos diferentes dispositivos NUI disponíveis no mercado, bibliotecas de desenvolvimento NUI para este tipo de dispositivos e algoritmos de reconhecimento de padrões. Com base nos dois elementos iniciais, foi possível obter uma visão mais concreta de qual o hardware e software disponíveis indicados à persecução do objetivo pretendido. O reconhecimento de padrões constitui um tema bastante extenso e complexo, de modo que foi necessária a seleção de um conjunto limitado deste tipo de algoritmos, realizando os respetivos testes por forma a determinar qual o que melhor se adequava ao objetivo pretendido. Aplicando as mesmas condições aos três algoritmos de reconhecimento de padrões permitiu avaliar as suas capacidades e determinar o$N como o que apresentou maior eficácia no reconhecimento. Por último, tentou-se averiguar a viabilidade do protótipo desenvolvido, tendo sido testado num universo de elementos de duas faixas etárias para determinar a capacidade de adaptação e aprendizagem destes dois grupos. Neste estudo, constatou-se um melhor desempenho inicial ao modo de interação do grupo de idade mais avançada. Contudo, o grupo mais jovem foi revelando uma evolutiva capacidade de adaptação a este modo de interação melhorando progressivamente os resultados.A new interaction paradigm, designated by Natural User Interface (NUI), for the recognition of gestures produced with the user’s body, is emerging. The interaction device Microsoft Kinect was originally designed to control video games, for console Xbox360. This device proves to be a viable wager to explore other areas such as support to the teaching and learning process for children of elementary school. The developed prototype aims to define a mode of interaction for drawing letters in the air, and perform the interpretation of the symbols by means of the pattern recognizers Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and $N. The development of this project was based on the study of different NUI devices available on the market, development libraries NUI for this type of devices and algorithms for pattern recognition. Based on the two initial elements, it was possible to get a more concrete vision of which of the available hardware and software adequate to achieve the intended goal. The pattern recognition is a very extensive and complex subject, so that it was necessary to select a limited set of such algorithms and perform tests to determine which one was the best suited to the intended purpose. Applying the same conditions to the three pattern recognition algorithms, it allowed to evaluate their skills and determine the$ N as the highest efficiency in recognition. Finally, the prototype’s underlying ideas were tested in a universe of elements from two age groups in order to determine the ability of adaptation and learning of these two groups. In this study, it was found an initial better perform to mode of interaction of the older age group. However, the younger group was revealing an evolutionary adaptability to this mode of interaction improving results progressively

Virtual air guitar: From research to business

Virtual Air Guitar (Virtuaalinen ilmakitara) oli tutkimusprojektina tehty tiedemuseon näyttelykohde, joka mahdollisti musiikin tuottamisen ilmakitaraeleillä. Se keräsi merkittävää kansainvälistä mediahuomiota, ja sen tekijät perustivat Virtual Air Guitar Company Oy -yrityksen, joka kehittää teknologiaa ja tuottaa videopelejä. Tämä diplomityö tutkii polkua tutkimuksesta liiketoimintaan useista näkökulmista. Alkuperäisen tutkimusprojektin menestystä analysoidaan arvioimalla tiedemuseon osallistumisen tärkeyttä sekä installation toimintaa epämuodollisten käyttäjätestien kautta. Uutisten ja juttujen leviämistä perinteisessä mediassa ja internetissä arvioidaan mediailmiönä, jonka taustalla on ilmakitaroinnin ilmiö fyysisenä tanssina sekä postmodernin ironian kulttuurin edustajana. Mediailmiötä verrataan muihin, minkä tuloksena sen todetaan olevan merkittävä mutta kertaluokkaa pienempi kuin suurimmat internet-ilmiöt. Työssä esitellään lisäksi Virtual Air Guitar Company Oy:n perustamisen mahdollistaneet tekijät vastasyntyneestä markkina-alueesta uusiin sosiaalisiin peleihin sekä teknologian kehitykseen. Tätä taustaa vasten esitellään case study yrityksen perustamisesta sarjana haasteita ja niiden ratkaisuja. Haasteisiin kuuluvat mm. rahoitus, rekrytointi ja tiiminrakennus, julkaisusopimuksen neuvottelu, yrityksen johtaminen, ketterän ohjelmistokehityksen johtaminen ja teknologian patentointi. Lopuksi esitellään suosituksia siitä, minkälaisista elementeistä voi syntyä mediailmiö ja kuinka tutkimusprojekteja kannattaa esitellä mediassa. Työ myös tarjoaa suosituksia liiketoiminnan kehitykseen tutkijoille, jotka ovat perustamassa uutta yritystä

Desarrollo y análisis de estrategias avanzadas de interacción en sistemas robóticos complejos de rehabilitación y asistencia

Los últimos informes indican que la incidencia de los accidentes cerebro vasculares van en aumento. Los supervivientes de un accidente cerebro vascular generalmente experimentan hemiparesia, lo que provoca un deterioro de las extremidades que implica un notable deterioro de la calidad de vida. La escasez de recursos junto con la necesidad de rehabilitación y asistencia que presentan estas personas, hacen que el cuidado y los ejercicios de rehabilitación que proporcionan las plataformas robóticas de rehabilitación cobren aún más importancia en la actualidad y en los próximos años. La presente Tesis Doctoral se centra en el desarrollo de una arquitectura multimodal capaz de implementar sistemas robóticos complejos de rehabilitación y asistencia. Con esta arquitectura, se plantea implementar y evaluar los siguientes sistemas. Primero, llevar a cabo la implementación de un sistema complejo de robótica asistencial. Después, desarrollar un sistema para la realización de terapias competitivas. Seguidamente, implementar un sistema para realizar terapias cooperativas. Y finalmente, desarrollar un sistema capaz de implementar terapias de tele-rehabilitación mediante una estrategia de teleoperación maestro-esclavo. Los principales resultados de esta tesis se han publicado en dos artículos en revistas incluidas en el Journal Citation Reports (JCR). La publicación “Feasibility and safety of shared EEG/EOG and vision-guided autonomous whole-arm exoskeleton control to perform activities of daily living” se ha evaluado la implementación de un sistema complejo de robótica asistencial basado en la arquitectura multimodal desarrollada en esta tesis, en el que se ha integrado con éxito multitud de sensores junto con diferentes interfaces de control y dispositivos robóticos para la creación de un sistema autónomo capaz de ayudar a un usuario a realizar actividades de la vida diaria. Por otro lado, en la publicación “Differences in Physiological Reactions Due to a Competitive Rehabilitation Game Modality”, se han analizado los cambios que se producen en el estado afectivo del paciente en una terapia de neurorrehabilitación asistida por robots debidos a una modalidad de juego multijugador de tipo competitivo. Finalmente, cabe destacar que uno de los resultados de la presente tesis ha dado lugar a la patente ES1234596U: Dispositivo robótico interconectable para rehabilitación de extremidades