Cheng-Liang Shih

Yoga is an exercise preferable for various users at different ages to enhance physical and mental health. To help beginner yoga self-practitioners avoid getting injured by selecting difficult yoga poses, the information of the difficulty level of yoga poses is very important to provide an objective metric to assist yoga self-practitioners in selecting appropriate exercises on the basis of their skill level by using the yoga self-practice system. To enhance the developed yoga self-practice system, the yoga difficulty level estimation function will enable users to clearly understand whether the selected yoga poses are suitable for them. In this paper, the newest difficulty level estimation method of yoga poses is proposed by using and analyzing OpenPose two-dimensional (2D) human body keypoints. The proposed method effectively uses the selected six keypoints areas of the upper and lower body, body support types, center of gravity calculations, and body tilt angles and slopes to produce estimations. Firstly, the method calculates the weighted centers of the upper and lower human body for each pose by using keypoints. Secondly, it refers the slope of the centroid line between the two centers and infers the body’s balance state. Lastly, the system estimates the difficulty level by additionally considering the keypoints of the body to contact the ground. For evaluations of the proposal, more than one hundred yoga poses are collected from the Internet and applied to classify them into five difficulty levels. Through comparisons with subjective levels from one instructor and 10 users, the validity of the estimation results is confirmed, a comparison is performed with existing designs, and it is implemented in embedded systems.

Currently, as an increasing number of people have been addicted to using cellular phones, smartphone tenosynovitis has become common from long-term use of fingers for their operations. Hand exercise while playing video games, which is called exergame, can be a good solution to provide enjoyable daily exercise opportunities for its prevention, particularly, for young people. In this paper, we implemented a simple exergame system with a hand gesture recognition program made in Python using the Mediapipe library. We designed three sets of hand gestures to control the key operations to play the games as different exercises useful for tenosynovitis prevention. For evaluations, we prepared five video games running on a web browser and asked 10 students from Okayama and Hiroshima Universities, Japan, to play them and answer 10 questions in the questionnaire. Their playing results and System Usability Scale (SUS) scores confirmed the usability of the proposal, although we improved one gesture set to reduce its complexity. Moreover, by measuring the angles for maximum wrist movements, we found that the wrist flexibility was improved by playing the games, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposal.