Near-Realistic Motion Video Games with Enforced Activity

Human activity monitoring, through the use of body-wearable sensors, allows for many exciting possibilities, from gaming, to exercise, to preventative health care, where childhood obesity is a growing epidemic. The rapidly increasing nature of this trend requires serious thought at targeting its causes and finding solutions. One major influence is video gaming and the hours of sedentary behavior associated with it. In this paper, we present our system for enforcing physical activity of humans playing video games with our body-worn sensor system as the controller. Body movements are communicated with the host computer that calculates physical activity via the metabolic equivalent of task, and runs signal processing algorithms to classify and enforce movements. A user study was conducted to validate the effectiveness and realism of the system while playing an actual video game and data was collected from these same users in order to verify the accuracy of our system. The results show a system that not only allows physical activity, but also enforces it, leading to healthier gaming and accurate motion analysis.