A Study of Exergame System Using Hand Gestures for Wrist Flexibility Improvement for Tenosynovitis Prevention

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 dail...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInformation (Basel) Vol. 15; no. 10; p. 622
Main Authors Xiao, Yanqi, Funabiki, Nobuo, Anggraini, Irin Tri, Shih, Cheng-Liang, Fan, Chih-Peng
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 10.10.2024
Subjects
Cameras
Computer & video games
exergame
Flexibility
Gesture recognition
Hand (anatomy)
hand gesture
Libraries
Mediapipe
Physical exercise
Prevention
Python
Questionnaires
Smartphones
Students
tenosynovitis
Trends
Usability
Wrist
Young adults
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2078-2489
2078-2489
DOI:10.3390/info15100622