Developing a framework for promoting physical activity in a Boccia game scenario

ABSTRACT

The traditional keyboard has been replaced by tactile screens or other types of implicit interfaces. An example of such interface is the Microsoft Kinect system, which makes use of a depth sensing system to enable the user-machine interaction. Allied to the physical activity, this hardware may be used to track and monitor the user when he/she is exercising, but also to diminish a sedentary lifestyle. In this paper, it is proposed a system based on such non-wearable and wearable devices to monitor the elderly while playing Boccia. This system allows to recognise the game movements as well as it registers other physiological variables of the player. The results show the comparison of different methods and approaches to recognise two main gestures used during a Boccia game. Firstly, the non-wearable and wearable approaches were compared by training an SVM model using data from Kinect and the Pandlet. From the results obtained, the accuracy for the model with Kinect was higher. Then, in order to improve the gesture recognition, several models were trained with the accelerometer data from the Pandlet. The results showed that the RBF SVM had better results achieving a cross-validation accuracy of 95%.

KEYWORDS:

• Activity monitoring
• Boccia
• Microsoft Kinect
• wearable and non-wearable devices
• Pandlet

Acknowledgments

This article is a result of the project Deus ex machina: NORTE- 01-0145-FEDER-000026, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This article is a result of the project Deus ex machina: NORTE- 01-0145-FEDER-000026, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Notes on contributors

Vinícius Silva

Vinícius Silva is a PhD student at University of Minho in the field of industrial electronics and computers engineering and researcher in R&D Algoritmi Centre. He received the M.Sc. degree Industrial Electronics and Computers Engineering. His areas of interest are Human Robot Interaction, Affective Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.

João Ramos

João Ramos (Habilitation, PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Minho. He is also a researcher at the ALGORITMI R&D centre, with interests in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Informatics applied to Health.

Pedro Leite

Pedro Leite is a PhD student at University of Minho in the field of industrial electronics and computers engineering and researcher in R&D Algoritmi Centre. His areas of interest are Human Computer Interaction, Embedded systems, and Machine Learning.

Filomena Soares

Filomena Soares received her degree in Chemical Engineering in 1986 at Porto University, Portugal. In 1997, she obtained her PhD in Chemical Engineering at the same University. Since 1992 she works in the Industrial Electronics Department Minho University and she develops her research work in R&D Algoritmi Centre. Her main scientific interests are in the areas of System Modeling and Control, with application to bioprocesses and in Biomedical Engineering Science.

Paulo Novais

Paulo Novais is an Associate Professor with Habilitation of Computer Science at the Department of Informatics, in the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal and a researcher at the ALGORITMI Centre in which He is also the header of Synthetic Intelligence Lab (http://islab.di.uminho.pt/), and the coordinator of the research line in “Ambient intelligence for well-being and Health Applications”. From the same university he received a PhD in Computer Science in 2003 and his Habilitation in Computer Science in 2011.

Pedro Arezes

Pedro Arezes is a Full Professor on Ergonomics and Human Factors Engineering at the School of Engineering, University of Minho (UMinho), in Portugal, and a visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard University, in USA. He is also the current National Director of the Portuguese governmental program for science and Technology MIT Portugal

Filipe Sousa

Filipe Sousa received the Bachelor and M.Sc. degrees in electrical and computer engineering the University of Porto in 2000 and 2008, respectively, and the master's degree in business information from the Catholic University of Porto and the Certificate Cisco Network Professional. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in wireless networks. In the past, he was a Researcher at INESC Porto from 2000 to 2009, where he actively participated in several European Research Projects. He is currently a Researcher with Fraunhofer AICOS, coordinating national and international research projects. His main research interests are wireless networks, mobile computing, and ambient assisted living.

Carina Figueira

Carina Figueira received the title of Master in Biomedical Engineering in October 2015 from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of NOVA University of Lisbon. During the Master, she worked in projects related to activity recognition using smartphones and wearable devices. Her master thesis was focused in human physical activity monitoring using smartphones built-in sensors. Since the beginning of December she has been working as a research engineer at Fraunhofer AICOS. Her main research areas are related to Signal Processing and Machine Learning.

António Santos

António Santos was graduated in Computer Science from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto in 2003. He has since then worked for 4 years as a researcher in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, mainly in the field of robotics and decision systems, where he had the chance to work in several EU-funded projects. During this period he has also obtained a MSc. degree in Computer Science. Since July 2007, and during 3 years, he worked as software developer and team leader at Nonius Software, a portuguese SME. Since October 2010, he started his activities as researcher and project manager at Fraunhofer AICOS (Assistive Information and Communication Solutions), and has been actively involved in EU-funded and national projects. The topics include remote patient monitoring, energy management and awareness, social mining and serious games using motion sensors. He is also supervisor of MSc. students and a member of the Scientific Board of this institution.