A proposal of exercise and performance learning assistant system for self-practice at home

Abstract

Due to pandemic spreads of COVID-19 and increasing populations of seniors, exercises or performance practices at home have become important to maintain healthy lives around the world. World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the physical health determines the Quality of Life (QoL) of a human. Unfortunately, a lot of people have no exercise and may be in unhealthy conditions. In this paper, we propose an Exercise and Performance Learning Assistant System (EPLAS) to assist people practicing exercises or learning performances by themselves at home. EPLAS adopts inexpensive devices and free software for low-cost implementation. It offers a video content of model actions by an instructor to be followed by the user, where the reaction is rated by comparing the feature points of the human bodies extracted by an open-source software OpenPose. For evaluations, we conduct experiments of applying EPLAS with five Yoga poses to 41 persons in Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan, and confirm the effectiveness of the proposal.