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Physical Activity Motivating Games:You Can PLAY,MATE!

Shlomo Berkovsky,Jill Freyne,Mac Coombe,Dipak Bhandari,Nilufar Baghaei

CSIRO Tasmanian ICT Centre GPO Box 1538,Hobart,Australia firstname.lastname@csiro.au

OZCHI '09: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7

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Outline

• INTRODUCTION• RELATED WORK• DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL

APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE• EMPIRICAL EVALUATION• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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INTRODUCTION(1/2)• Contemporary lifestyle is becoming increasingly inactive: a

little physical activity and much sedentary activity.

• Present a novel approach aimed at combating sedentary in context of computer games.

• The game is called PLAY MATE!(PhysicaL ActivitY MotivaTing gamEs).

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INTRODUCTION(2/2)• PLAY,MATE! Is design to a publicly available computer game,

Neverball.

• Each user was equipped with a 3D accelerometer.

• The contributions of this work are two-fold:– Firstly,we propose a novel PLAY,MATE! Design for physical activity

motivating games and practically exemplify its application.– Secondly,we empirically evaluate the acceptance of the design and its

influence on users.

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RELATED WORK(1/2)• Lin et. al., 2006

– presented a social application recording users' physical activity and linking it to the growth of a virtual fish

• Toscos et. al., 2006– presented a mobile application recording users' physical activity and sending messages

encouraging exercising

• These applications had several weaknesses including the unreliability and inaccuracy of self-reporting and the possibility of cheating the application.

• From a behavioural perspective, these applications were aimed at changing the lifestyle by indirectly encouraging the users to perform physical activity.

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RELATED WORK(2/2)• Commercial products

– Dance-Dance Revolution– Nintendo Wii– PCGamerBike

• These games should be treated as commercial products providing bodily interfaces or controllers allowing anintuitive interaction mode with computer games rather than motivators of physical activity.

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(1/3)

• The goal of the PLAY, MATE! game design is to change the sedentary nature of game playing to include certain aspects of physical activity.

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(2/3)

• The motivation to perform physical activity is achieved by modifying the following game components and aspects of user interaction with the game:-Game motivator-Activity interface-Game control

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF PLAY,MATE(3/3)

• To experimentally evaluate the PLAY, MATE! design, we applied it to an open source GPL Neverball game.

• We used a 3D accelerometer to capture user's physical activity and transmitted the acceleration signal to Neverball

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EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(1/4)

• We conducted an experimental evaluation involving 180children aged 9 to 12-Sedentary -PLAY,MATE!

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EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(2/4)• compares the number of jumps recognised in these two groups

• compares the relative time distribution between the sedentary playing and performing physical activity

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EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(3/4)• depicts the average perception across the two groups.

• the playing perception as a function of the number of jumps recognised.

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EMPIRICAL EVALUATION(4/4)

• The number of users that agreed with two factors of a particular relevance to the enjoyment.

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CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

• Two important conclusions:-Firstly-Secondly

• PLAY, MATE! design to various types of computer games.