A PLATFORM TO PROMOTE A MORE ACTIVE LIFESTYLE BETWEEN STUDENTS Cover Image

A PLATFORM TO PROMOTE A MORE ACTIVE LIFESTYLE BETWEEN STUDENTS
A PLATFORM TO PROMOTE A MORE ACTIVE LIFESTYLE BETWEEN STUDENTS

Author(s): Imad Alex Awada, Irina Mocanu
Subject(s): Health and medicine and law, Sports Studies, Distance learning / e-learning
Published by: Carol I National Defence University Publishing House
Keywords: Physical Exercises; Gamification; Multimodal Interface; Healthy Lifestyle;

Summary/Abstract: Due to the current lifestyle, people in general and adolescents in particular are not physically active enough which put at risk their health. Immediate actions are needed to promote a more active lifestyle. This paper introduces a platform that aims to encourage students to have a more active life. The platform suggests for each user to perform specific physical activities/exercises based on the physical activities that the user had during the day, the duration of the sleep and his/her profile (preferences, performance history) as well as some health parameters (heart rate, blood pressure, weight). All these tasks are realized through a game with an avatar that is controlled by the user through the execution of the different physical exercises/activities in real life (e.g. the avatar is placed in an environment to collect different objects; to do that, the user will have to jump and to run in real life). The exercises performed by the user are acquired using an RGB camera. Images are processed and the skeleton of the user is obtained using the OpenPose library. To increase motivation, the platform gives different rewards (e.g. more points) for executing physical tasks and suggests some collective physical activities based on the profile of each user. The platform is multilingual, it supports Romanian and English languages, with the possibility to extend it to other languages. The platform integrates a multimodal interface that enables the users to interact through voice and touch-based commands as well as touch-free gestures. During the execution of a physical exercise, the platform tracks the performance of the user. The platform sends visual and phonetic notifications to the users’ phones to suggest the execution of some physical activities/exercises.

  • Issue Year: 16/2020
  • Issue No: 03
  • Page Range: 355-362
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: English