ExerLink: Enabling Pervasive Social Exergames with Heterogeneous Exercise Devices

We envision that diverse social exercising games, or exergames, will emerge, featuring much richer interactivity with immersive game play experiences. Further, the recent advances of mobile devices and wireless networking will make such social engagement more pervasive - people carry portable exergame devices (e.g., jump ropes) and interact with remote users anytime, anywhere. Towards this goal, we explore the potential of using heterogeneous exercise devices as game controllers for a multi-player social exergame; e.g., playing a boat paddling game with two remote exercisers (one with a jump rope, and the other with a treadmill). In this paper, we propose a novel platform called ExerLink that converts exercise intensity to game inputs and intelligently balances intensity/delay variations for fair game play experiences. We report the design considerations and guidelines obtained from the design and development processes of game controllers. We validate the efficacy of game controllers and demonstrate the feasibility of social exergames with heterogeneous exercise devices via extensive human subject studies.

RubberBand: augmenting teacher's awareness of spatially isolated children on kindergarten field trips

On school field trips, chaperoning teachers' foremost concern is the safety of the children, particularly ensuring that none of them go missing. However, they have limited attention resources and face many challenges in keeping track of their charges. We present RubberBand, an assistive application that helps alleviate the teacher's burden. Our approach adapts to diverse field trip environmental and child behavioral dynamicity, utilizing observations of the relative dispersion of children and their tendency to form sub-groups.1

Running or gaming

We developed Exertainer, a sensor-enabled, interactive running entertainment system to support advanced exercise applications. We designed Exertainer to be used in urban environments where outdoor running is often not convenient or practical; as such, Exertainer and Exertainer running applications represent an attractive alternative to traditional treadmill running. Exertainer effectively creates a robust design space around treadmill running. Developers can leverage Exertainer's components, an advanced treadmill called Interactive Treadmill, Sensor Bracelet and the PSD game platform, to design interactive and immersive running games and other advanced running applications. We also developed Swan Boat, a multiplayer team racing game making the treadmill running an exciting social activity, and conducted a user study.1