Fabio Buttussi

MOPET: A context-aware and user-adaptive wearable system for fitness training

OBJECTIVE Cardiovascular disease, obesity, and lack of physical fitness are increasingly common and negatively affect peoples health, requiring medical assistance and decreasing peoples wellness and productivity. In the last years, researchers as well as companies have been increasingly investigating wearable devices for fitness applications with the aim of improving users health, in terms of cardiovascular benefits, loss of weight or muscle strength. Dedicated GPS devices, accelerometers, step counters and heart rate monitors are already commercially available, but they are usually very limited in terms of user interaction and artificial intelligence capabilities. This significantly limits the training and motivation support provided by current systems, making them poorly suited for untrained people who are more interested in fitness for health rather than competitive purposes. To better train and motivate users, we propose the mobile personal trainer (MOPET) system. METHODS AND MATERIAL MOPET is a wearable system that supervises a physical fitness activity based on alternating jogging and fitness exercises in outdoor environments. By exploiting real-time data coming from sensors, knowledge elicited from a sport physiologist and a professional trainer, and a user model that is built and periodically updated through a guided autotest, MOPET can provide motivation as well as safety and health advice, adapted to the user and the context. To better interact with the user, MOPET also displays a 3D embodied agent that speaks, suggests stretching or strengthening exercises according to users current condition, and demonstrates how to correctly perform exercises with interactive 3D animations. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION By describing MOPET, we show how context-aware and user-adaptive techniques can be applied to the fitness domain. In particular, we describe how such techniques can be exploited to train, motivate, and supervise users in a wearable personal training system for outdoor fitness activity.

Bringing mobile guides and fitness activities together: a solution based on an embodied virtual trainer

Sports and fitness are increasingly attracting the interest of computer science researchers as well as companies. In particular, recent mobile devices with hardware graphics acceleration offer new, still unexplored possibilities. This paper investigates the use of mobile guides in fitness activities, proposing the Mobile Personal Trainer (MOPET) application. MOPET uses a GPS device to monitor users position during her physical activity in an outdoor fitness trail. It provides navigation assistance by using a fitness trail map and giving speech directions. Moreover, MOPET provides motivation support and exercise demonstrations by using an embodied virtual trainer, called Evita. Evita shows how to correctly perform the exercises along the trail with 3D animations and incites the user. To the best of our knowledge, our project is the first to employ a mobile guide for fitness activities. The effects of MOPET on motivation, as well as its navigational and training support, have been experimentally evaluated with 12 users. Evaluation results encourage the use of mobile guides and embodied virtual trainers in outdoor fitness applications.

Assessing Knowledge Retention of an Immersive Serious Game vs. a Traditional Education Method in Aviation Safety.

Thanks to the increasing availability of consumer head-mounted displays, educational applications of immersive VR could now reach to the general public, especially if they include gaming elements (immersive serious games). Safety education of citizens could be a particularly promising domain for immersive serious games, because people tend not to pay attention to and benefit from current safety materials. In this paper, we propose an HMD-based immersive game for educating passengers about aviation safety that allows players to experience a serious aircraft emergency with the goal of surviving it. We compare the proposed approach to a traditional aviation safety education method (the safety card) used by airlines. Unlike most studies of VR for safety knowledge acquisition, we do not focus only on assessing learning immediately after the experience but we extend our attention to knowledge retention over a longer time span. This is a fundamental requirement, because people need to retain safety procedures in order to apply them when faced with danger. A knowledge test administered before, immediately after and one week after the experimental condition showed that the immersive serious game was superior to the safety card. Moreover, subjective as well as physiological measurements employed in the study showed that the immersive serious game was more engaging and fear-arousing than the safety card, a factor that can contribute to explain the obtained superior retention, as we discuss in the paper.

Rendering of X3D content on mobile devices with OpenGL ES

The availability of more powerful mobile devices, sometimes equipped with graphics accelerators, is making it easier to experiment with mobile 3D graphics. In this paper, we exploit the main emerging standard in 3D rendering on mobile devices (OpenGL ES) to build a mobile player (called MobiX3D) for X3D and H-Anim content. The rendering engine of the MobiX3D player supports classic lighting and shading algorithms. We discuss the performance of the player and we apply it to sign language visualization.

Adaptation of Graphics and Gameplay in Fitness Games by Exploiting Motion and Physiological Sensors

Obesity and lack of physical fitness are increasingly common in adults as well as children and can negatively affect health. Regular physical activity, such as jogging or training in a fitness center, is recommended by physiologists to fight obesity and improve ones fitness, but usually requires considerable motivation. Recently, researchers as well as companies have proposed a few fitness games, i.e. videogames where users play by performing physical exercises, in which game elements (such as graphics and gameplay) are used to encourage people to exercise regularly. This paper proposes a fitness game system which aims at combining arcade-style game graphics, physiological sensors (e.g. heart rate monitor, 3D accelerometer), and an adaptation engine. The adaptation engine considers personal information provided by the user (e.g., age and gender), her current heart rate and movements, and information collected during previous game sessions to adjust the required intensity of physical exercises through context-aware and user-adaptive dynamic adaptations of graphics and gameplay. Besides describing the general system, the paper presents two implemented games and a preliminary user evaluation, which also led us to introduce in the system a 3D virtual human.

Evaluation of a 3D serious game for advanced life support retraining

OBJECTIVE Advanced life support (ALS) knowledge and skills decrease in as little as three months, but only a few ALS providers actually attend retraining courses. We assess the effectiveness of a 3D serious game as a new tool for frequent ALS retraining. METHODS We developed a 3D serious game for scenario-based ALS retraining. The serious game, called EMSAVE, was designed to promote self-correction while playing. We organized a retraining course in which 40 ALS providers played two cardiac arrest scenarios with EMSAVE and took a test with 38 multiple-choice questions before and after playing. We administered the same test again 3 months later to evaluate retention. Participants also rated EMSAVE and the overall retraining experience. RESULTS After using EMSAVE, the number of correct answers per participant increased by 4.8 (95%CI +3.4, +6.2, p<0.001) and all but one participant improved. After 3 months, despite an expected decrease in ALS knowledge and skills (-1.9 correct answers, 95%CI -0.6, -3.3, p<0.01), there was a significant retention benefit (+2.9 correct answers per participant, 95%CI +1.5, +4.2, p<0.001). Moreover, all but one participant regarded EMSAVE as a valuable tool to refresh ALS knowledge and skills, and 85% of participants were also willing to devote 1h/month to retrain with the serious game. CONCLUSIONS A 3D serious game for scenario-based retraining proved effective to retrain in ALS and supported retention of acquired knowledge and skills at 3 months. EMSAVE also positively engaged and motivated participants.

Using Web3D technologies for visualization and search of signs in an international sign language dictionary

Sign languages are visual languages used by deaf people to communicate. As with spoken languages, sign languages vary among countries and have their own vocabulary and grammar. Therefore, the different deaf communities need a dictionary that associates signs to the words of the spoken language of their country as well as dictionaries which translate signs from a sign language to another. Several researchers proposed multimedia dictionaries for sign languages of specific countries, but there are only a few proposals of multilanguage dictionaries. Moreover, current multimedia dictionaries suffer from serious limitations. Most of them allow only for a word-to-sign search, while only a few of them exploit sign parameters (i.e., handshape, orientation, location, and movement) to allow for a sign-to-word search. Current solutions also commonly use pictures or videos to represent signs and their parameters, but 2D images are often misleading for a correct identification (e.g., recognizing an handshape can be very difficult due to occlusions). This paper aims at facing the above described issues, exploiting Web3D technologies such as X3D and H-Anim humanoids to better understand signs and to simplify sign-to-word and sign-to-sign search, by proposing an online international sign language dictionary, called 3DictSL. The paper presents the client-server architecture of 3DictSL and authoring tools which allow deaf communities to extend the dictionary with their own language. As a practical case study, the paper discusses the implementation of Italian Sign Language (LIS).

H-animator: a visual tool for modeling, reuse and sharing of X3D humanoid animations

Humanoid animation is a complex task which usually requires particular skills and training. To simplify this process we propose a visual tool, called H-Animator, which aims to help animators (especially the novice ones) in modeling X3D animations for H-Anim humanoids. Besides easiness of use, achieved through intuitive metaphors and interaction styles, we aim at providing an architecture to facilitate the reuse and sharing of X3D content, allowing animators to build a wide archive of material to be reused.

Effects of Different Types of Virtual Reality Display on Presence and Learning in a Safety Training Scenario

The increasing availability of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for home use motivates the study of the possible effects that adopting this new hardware might have on users. Moreover, while the impact of display type has been studied for different kinds of tasks, it has been scarcely explored in procedural training. Our study considered three different types of displays used by participants for training in aviation safety procedures with a serious game. The three displays were respectively representative of: (i) desktop VR (a standard desktop monitor), (ii) many setups for immersive VR used in the literature (an HMD with narrow field of view and a 3-DOF tracker), and (iii) new setups for immersive home VR (an HMD with wide field of view and 6-DOF tracker). We assessed effects on knowledge gain, and different self-reported measures (self-efficacy, engagement, presence). Unlike previous studies of display type that measured effects only immediately after the VR experience, we considered also a longer time span (2 weeks). Results indicated that the display type played a significant role in engagement and presence. The training benefits (increased knowledge and self-efficacy) were instead obtained, and maintained at two weeks, regardless of the display used. The paper discusses the implications of these results.

Desktop virtual reality for emergency preparedness: user evaluation of an aircraft ditching experience under different fear arousal conditions

Virtual Reality (VR), in the form of 3D interactive simulations of emergency scenarios, is increasingly used for emergency preparedness training. This paper advances knowledge about different aspects of such virtual emergency experiences, showing that: (i) the designs we propose in the paper are effective in improving emergency preparedness of common citizens, considering aviation safety as a relevant case study, (ii) changing specific visual and auditory features is effective to create emotionally different versions of the same experience, increasing the level of fear aroused in users, and (iii) the protection motivation role of fear highlighted by psychological studies of traditional media applies to desktop VR too.