A UMBC HCC Master’s student I advised on an independent study last semester, Samyukta Ganesan, recently had our CHI 2012 work-in-progress paper accepted! The paper, titled “Using the Kinect to Encourage Older Adults to Exercise: A Prototype,” presents our work so far on a project to develop a Kinect exercise game for older adults. The project page for this work is located here.
Here is the abstract:
This paper reports current progress on a project that aims to find the factors that play an important role in motivating older adults to maintain a physical exercise routine, a habit recommended by doctors but difficult to sustain. Our initial data gathering includes an interview with an expert in aging and physical therapy, and a focus group with older adults on the topics of exercise and technology. Based on these data, an early prototype game has been implemented for the Microsoft Kinect that aims to help encourage older adults to exercise. The Kinect application has been tested for basic usability and found to be promising. Next steps include play-tests with older adults, iterative development of the game to add motivational features, and evaluation of the game’s success in encouraging older adults to maintain an exercise regimen.
The camera-ready version of our paper is here. Samyukta and I are continuing on this project this semester, implementing a new version of the game that takes into account the design considerations we developed last semester.
Lisa Anthony 