Abstract:

In the era of the 100-year life, continuous learning, working on health, and having a sense of purpose in life are becoming increasingly important issues, especially for the elderly. While learning and finding purpose are personal matters, the initiative and support of one’s residential area play an important role in maintaining and improving health. In Japan, there are locally unique exercises in many areas, including the lively “100-year-old exercises” designed for each area. Elderly persons have been tackling these exercises at meeting houses in their respective areas, sometimes with the help of their area’s comprehensive support center. The center staff supports the exercise activity by conducting physical fitness tests, distributing DVDs of the exercise videos, and more. However, due to Covid-19 restrictions in 2021, they were suddenly unable to gather in person for these activities. They had no internet access at the meeting place and no help. They missed the fun of communication, which had actually motivated their continuous exercise. Therefore, they needed some means to continue the exercise and additional support to stay motivated.

In this paper, we propose a physical exercise support system for the elderly and aim to support an elder person and the staff of the area's comprehensive support center. The exercise is the lively 100 year old exercise produced by Hiroshima City and the system is based on gamification. The system features are as follows: customizable in personal differences such as preference and physical, executable under the ordinary environment, and usable offline and online. The system runs on an inexpensive laptop computer with a web camera. The software is developed as a web-based application. There are two modes; a learning mode and a game mode. In order to support the elderly, a goal position of body part for each exercise can be adaptable according to personal differences. The system detects their motions by means of an existing object detection technology. The motion will be judged for the effectiveness of each motion to provide cheering messages (voice/text) in the learning mode or to calculate points in the game mode. It also provides personal record graphs to support a person who will give comprehensive advice to the elderly for a longer time span.

The system’s usability was verified through preliminary experiments based on the feedback of 5 elderly cooperators and 5 staff cooperators. The results showed that there were several pose detection errors during the experiments, but they were not so bad as to prevent the system from providing motivational messages. Using a 5-point Likert scale for elderly persons, the average point for the game, voice message for cheering on, and voice message for improving points were higher than 4.0, respectively. However, the score for continuing the system was 3.5. The system might not be usable by oneself due to the user’s ICT skill level. Using the same 5-point Likert scale for support staff, pictograms and snapshots scored higher than 4.0, but the graph for presenting to the elderly scored lower than 3.0.

The remaining issues are evaluating the proposed system for the long term to determine whether elderly persons will be pleased and continue to use the system. Additionally, the system’s user interface for elderly persons and support staff should be improved. Supporting the physical exercisers as a team will be a future work.

Keywords:

Physical exercise learning, gamification, elderly person, healthcare.