ExercisePill: An Exercise Application for Balance Problems in the Elderly

Abstract

ExercisePill is a Microsoft Kinect®-based exercise application developed for balance problems in the elderly. There were three factors to be considered when developing the application. First, it must be functional, usable, and reliable. To ensure this, each of the 20 participants in the program was observed and evaluated by experienced physicians over the course of the 2 months duration of the program. The 20 participants were equally divided between a control group and an exercise group. Testing of the app and a following satisfaction survey were the primary methods applied for measuring the reliability of the application. The second factor was in-home or unsupervised exercise, necessary for reasons such as the time and cost of transport for patients to attend medical centers. This, and other social and personal problems, tended to have a demotivating effect on the elderly influencing them to undertake beneficial exercise programs privately. Especially this latter aspect of the situation gave rise to the third important factor to be addressed, and that was the ability to monitor the progress of the patient. This gave rise to the development of a database in which the results for each exercise are stored and which can be checked anytime. The results from the program showed that the exercise group, who had used the computer application, had remarkably higher scores in most of the balance tests, indicating the effectiveness of the application.