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3-D streaming supplying partner protocols for mobile collaborative exergaming for health
Insights
Childhood obesity is a major health concern. This study introduces MOSAIC, a peer-to-peer mobile exergame system that reduces network delays to encourage longer, collaborative physical activity for children.
Area of Science:
- Public Health
- Computer Science
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Childhood obesity presents significant health challenges, including diabetes and mental health issues.
- Current exergames, while innovative, often suffer from network latency due to client-server architectures, hindering prolonged engagement.
- Addressing the social aspects of obesity is crucial for motivating children's participation in physical activities.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce MOSAIC, a novel mobile collaborative exergame system utilizing peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture.
- To develop and evaluate two partner selection protocols designed to optimize 3D data streaming for exergames.
- To enhance physical and social well-being in children by promoting extended, team-based exercise.
Main Methods:
- Developed a peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile collaborative exergame system named MOSAIC.
- Designed two novel supplying partner selection protocols to efficiently stream 3D data.
- Utilized mobile devices, including head-mounted devices (HMDs), for immersive and active gameplay in large areas.
Main Results:
- The MOSAIC system and its protocols significantly improve streaming quality and reduce network delay.
- Efficient partner selection protocols enable quicker discovery of data sources, minimizing acquisition time.
- The P2P architecture overcomes traditional client-server limitations, preventing bottlenecks and latency.
Conclusions:
- MOSAIC offers a promising solution to combat childhood obesity through engaging, collaborative, and technically robust exergames.
- The proposed P2P architecture and partner selection protocols effectively enhance the user experience by ensuring smooth, uninterrupted gameplay.
- This approach encourages longer exercise durations and social interaction, positively impacting children's physical and mental health.
Abstract:
Childhood obesity is nowadays considered as one of the major health problems that many societies suffer from. The obesity epidemic leads to several life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and mental health problems like depression, anxiety and loneliness just to mention a few. Several approaches, including physical exercises, strict dietary, and exergames among others, have been adopted to address the obesity epidemic. Exergames are considered the innovative approach for fighting several health problem such as the obesity, where a combination of exercise and 3D gaming are proposed to incite kids to exercise as a team. Collaborative exergaming became even more popular given that it addresses the social side of the obesity epidemic, and it motivates kids to socialize with other kids. Traditional exergames are based on the client server approach where the server is responsible for streaming the 3D environment. However, this can lead to latency and server bottleneck if many clients participate in the exergame, which leads to the kids stopping exercising. Having an exergame application that does not suffer from networking problem such as delay, is very important given that it increases the exercise hours. In this work, we propose a new trend of mobile collaborative exergming applications that is based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, as well as two supplying partner selection protocols that aim at selecting the suitable source responsible for streaming the relevant 3D data. Our system, that we refer to as MOSAIC, is intended for mobile collaborative exergames that incite kids to move inside a large area, using thin mobile devices such as head mounted devices (HMD), have physical exercises, and collaborate with other kids which in consequence address several health problems such as the obesity epidemic on the physical and social plans. Our proposed mobile collaborative exergame aims at inciting the kids to exercise as a team for a longer time by improving the quality of the streaming and reducing the delay. This is accomplished by our proposed supplying partner selection protocols that provide a quick discovery of multiple supplying partners, by minimizing the time required the to acquire data. The performance evaluation we have obtained to evaluate our suite of protocols using a realistic set of exergame scenarios for obese kids is then presented and discussed.
