Biofeedback Applied to Interactive Serious Games to Monitor Frailty in an Elderly Population

A graph-based approach can improve keypoint detection of complex poses: a proof-of-concept on injury occurrences in alpine ski racing

For most applications, 2D keypoint detection works well and offers a simple and fast tool to analyse human movements. However, there remain many situations where even the best state-of-the-art algorithms reach their limits and fail to detect human keypoints correctly. Such situations may occur especially when individual body parts are occluded, twisted, or when the whole person is flipped. Especially when analysing injuries in alpine ski racing, such twisted and rotated body positions occur frequently. To improve the detection of keypoints for this application, we developed a novel method that refines keypoint estimates by rotating the input videos. We select the best rotation for every frame with a graph-based global solver. Thereby, we improve keypoint detection of an arbitrary pose estimation algorithm, in particular for 'hard' keypoints. In the current proof-of-concept study, we show that our approach outperforms standard keypoint detection results in all categories and in all metrics, in injury-related out-of-balance and fall situations by a large margin as well as previous methods, in performance and robustness. The Injury Ski II dataset was made publicly available, aiming to facilitate the investigation of sports accidents based on computer vision in the future.

Comparative Analysis of Skeleton-Based Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation (HPE) has become a prevalent research topic in computer vision. The technology can be applied in many areas, such as video surveillance, medical assistance, and sport motion analysis. Due to higher demand for HPE, many HPE libraries have been developed in the last 20 years. In the last 5 years, more and more skeleton-based HPE algorithms have been developed and packaged into libraries to provide ease of use for researchers. Hence, the performance of these libraries is important when researchers intend to integrate them into real-world applications for video surveillance, medical assistance, and sport motion analysis. However, a comprehensive performance comparison of these libraries has yet to be conducted. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of four popular state-of-the-art skeleton-based HPE libraries for human pose detection, including OpenPose, PoseNet, MoveNet, and MediaPipe Pose. A comparative analysis of these libraries based on images and videos is presented in this paper. The percentage of detected joints (PDJ) was used as the evaluation metric in all comparative experiments to reveal the performance of the HPE libraries. MoveNet showed the best performance for detecting different human poses in static images and videos.

Serious Games and Mixed Reality Applications for Healthcare

Serious games are games in which the main goal is not entertainment, but a serious purpose ranging from the acquisition of knowledge to interactive training, to name just a few [...]

A Systematic Review of the Application of Camera-Based Human Pose Estimation in the Field of Sport and Physical Exercise

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) has received considerable attention during the past years, improving its performance thanks to the use of Deep Learning, and introducing new interesting uses, such as its application in Sport and Physical Exercise (SPE). The aim of this systematic review is to analyze the literature related to the application of HPE in SPE, the available data, methods, performance, opportunities, and challenges. One reviewer applied different inclusion and exclusion criteria, as well as quality metrics, to perform the paper filtering through the paper databases. The Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library, Web of Science, and dblp included more than 500 related papers after the initial filtering, finally resulting in 20. In addition, research was carried out regarding the publicly available data related to this topic. It can be concluded that even if related public data can be found, much more data is needed to be able to obtain good performance in different contexts. In relation with the methods of the authors, the use of general purpose systems as base, such as Openpose, combined with other methods and adaptations to the specific use case can be found. Finally, the limitations, opportunities, and challenges are presented.