Do player performance, real sport experience, and gender affect movement patterns during equivalent exergame?

The Impact of Implementing an Exergame Program on the Level of Reaction Time Optimization in Handball, Volleyball, and Basketball Players

The main aim of the present study was to implement an exergame program that uses Fitlight technology to identify the impact on motor, recognition, and cognitive reaction times in junior athletes practicing team sports: basketball, handball, and volleyball. The second aim was to identifying differences in progress of the three types of reaction time between female and male players through computerized tests. The study included 360 subjects for basketball, 130 athletes of which were 68 male subjects and 62 female subjects; for handball, 124 athletes of which 64 were male subjects and 60 female athletes; for volleyball, 106 athletes of which 48 male were subjects and 48 female athletes. Characteristics of the experimental players: average age ± SD 13.60 ± 1.07; average sports experience ± SD 6.24 ± 0.92. The research included an initial and a final test between which a program of exergames was implemented over a period of 3 months focused on optimizing human reaction times. The evaluation of the reaction times was carried out through three computer games, the results being processed in SPSS 22. The relevant results of the research: for the simple motor reaction time (MSRT), the greatest progress between tests was the volleyball group, and for women, it was the basketball group; for the recognition reaction time (RRT), the male handball group and the female basketball group recorded the greatest progress; for the cognitive reactive time (CRT), the greatest progress was achieved by the male and female volleyball players. In all tests, the progress of the female basketball, handball, and volleyball players showed superior progress to similar male players. The results of the research highlighted the effectiveness of the experimental exergame program by using Fitlight technology in optimizing human reaction times in junior team-game athletes. Using computer games to evaluate reaction times allowed us to differentiate the evaluation on the types of human reactions under both standardized conditions but also under conditions of efficiency and attractiveness.

Does exergaming drive future physical activity and sport intentions?

We studied how usability and playability of sport exergames affect future intentions of participation in physical activity or actual sport. We employed questionnaires to measure participants' enjoyment, usability, game-experience, and future intentions of physical activity and real sport. We compared the outcomes based on players' gender, previous real-swimming, and exergame experience. Psychological parameters were not different between groups but players without exergame experience enjoyed the game more. Physical activity intentions increased for all participants but not swimming intentions. The limitations of current gaming systems and their effects on players' gaming experience and intentions are discussed.

Human Actions Analysis: Templates Generation, Matching and Visualization Applied to Motion Capture of Highly-Skilled Karate Athletes

The aim of this paper is to propose and evaluate the novel method of template generation, matching, comparing and visualization applied to motion capture (kinematic) analysis. To evaluate our approach, we have used motion capture recordings (MoCap) of two highly-skilled black belt karate athletes consisting of 560 recordings of various karate techniques acquired with wearable sensors. We have evaluated the quality of generated templates; we have validated the matching algorithm that calculates similarities and differences between various MoCap data; and we have examined visualizations of important differences and similarities between MoCap data. We have concluded that our algorithms works the best when we are dealing with relatively short (2–4 s) actions that might be averaged and aligned with the dynamic time warping framework. In practice, the methodology is designed to optimize the performance of some full body techniques performed in various sport disciplines, for example combat sports and martial arts. We can also use this approach to generate templates or to compare the correct performance of techniques between various top sportsmen in order to generate a knowledge base of reference MoCap videos. The motion template generated by our method can be used for action recognition purposes. We have used the DTW classifier with angle-based features to classify various karate kicks. We have performed leave-one-out action recognition for the Shorin-ryu and Oyama karate master separately. In this case, 100% actions were correctly classified. In another experiment, we used templates generated from Oyama master recordings to classify Shorin-ryu master recordings and vice versa. In this experiment, the overall recognition rate was 94.2%, which is a very good result for this type of complex action.