Energy Browser: To Make Exercise Enjoyable and Interesting Satoshi Nakamura
Mitsuru Minakuchi
National Institute of Information and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan Communications Technology, Japan 3-5, Hikaridai, Seikacho, Soraku-gun, 3-5, Hikaridai, Seikacho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, Japan Kyoto, Japan +81-774-98-6888 +81-774-98-6888
[email protected]
[email protected]
Katusmi Tanaka Kyoto University Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto, Japan +81-75-753-5969
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
exceed the number of underweight people in the near future.
Previously, we developed a Web browser called the EnergyBrowser system that gives people an incentive to exercise. In the EnergyBrowser system, the user wears a motion sensor and walks/runs on a treadmill. Web pages are displayed incrementally in proportion to the rate of walking/running. The user can exercise while browsing the Web. In this paper, we will evaluate the effectiveness of the EnergyBrowser system, which we exhibited at an open house and evaluated using a questionnaire. We will discuss the effectiveness of our system.
This has caused a boom in the health and fitness industries. There are now more gyms than previously, and they provide a range of exercise machines, such as treadmills, exercise bikes, benches, and presses. However, most people soon quit because exercising using stationary machines is tedious. For example, you need to walk or run for at least 20 minutes to burn fat, but exercising for this length of time without any stimulus is boring.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interface – input devices and strategies, interaction styles, prototyping
General Terms Design, Human Factors
Keywords Web browser, exercise, fitness, intellectual stimulus, treadmill, lifestyle-related diseases, content presentation
1. INTRODUCTION Constant advances in automation technologies, such as greatly improved transportation and computing systems, have made people’s lives easier and more comfortable. These technological advances have decreased people’s energy expenditure. Additionally, advancements in agricultural technology have contributed to the problem of obesity in many developed countries. Basically, many people no longer have the correct balance between caloric intake and caloric expenditure, and, as a result, the incidence of lifestyle-related diseases such as obesity has increased because people no longer get enough exercise [5]. Some institutions warn that the number of overweight people will
Some people listen to music or watch television while exercising, but it is difficult to enjoy both the exercise and the entertainment because they are often unrelated. Dance Dance Revolution [2] (DDR), produced by KONAMI Corp., is a video game that makes it fun for players to exercise by relating the player’s steps to music. However, players can only select from a limited number of songs to which the dance patterns are linked. Many players quickly face levels of difficulty that are beyond their dance ability. As a result, they get bored and give up. Some researchers have promoted the enjoyment of exercise using virtual reality (VR) and exercise equipment, such as exercise bikes and treadmills [1, 3]. These systems apply the users’ activities in real space to their activities in virtual space. However, these are very expensive and users can suffer from virtual reality sickness. In addition, they get bored exercising in VR spaces because they are so limited. By the way, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “there is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." People want and enjoy knowledge acquisition. In Japan, one of the most popular television programs “Trivial Fountain (in Japanese, TORIBIA NO IZUMI)” provides a variety of trivial knowledge for the viewers. We believe that providing an intellectual stimulus for people will make exercise enjoyable. Making exercise enjoyable takes the sting out of it. We believe that the keys for encouraging users to keep exercising every day are: z
Real achievement
z
Intellectual stimulus
z
Content variety
Real achievement means that systems should provide clear evidence of the effects of exercise so that users can feel a sense of achievement and progress while exercising. Intellectual stimulus means that systems should satisfy users’ intellectual curiosity. Content variety means that systems should provide an
inexhaustible supply of information to users because people get bored easily.
2. ENERGY BROWSER The EnergyBrowser system [4] requires the user’s activity to enable Web browsing to take place. The EnergyBrowser system conceptually converts the calories burned exercising into information (Web pages). The user inputs energy to the EnergyBrowser system by exercising (walking/jogging on a treadmill). The EnergyBrowser system displays Web pages containing information for the user. Conventional Web browsers are expected to display Web pages quickly and accurately. In contrast, the EnergyBrowser system has to display the Web pages readably during exercise.
Figure 1. Serializing Web content
In the EnergyBrowser system, by extending the concept of timebased content representation, we introduced a gradual Web rendering mechanism based on consumed calories as the core mechanism. In a gradual Web rendering mechanism, the system first selects the target Web page from an URL list and downloads it. Next, the system divides the acquired Web page into many parts and serializes them (see figure 1). Then, using a sensor, it monitors the number of calories burned and converts them into a part of the Web page and renders it to the user (see figure 2). In this system, people can change the reading (browsing, rendering) speed by adjusting their walking/jogging speed. We used a 3D motion sensor (MDP-A3U9S) produced by NEC TOKIN Corp. to estimate the amount of energy used. The sensor is attached to the user’s waist. The equipment detects the amount of energy burned by estimating the number of steps from the sensor output, and then converts the burned energy into calories. Figure 3 shows the appearances of the EnergyBrowser system. The picture on the left shows the air-walker version while the one on the right figure shows the treadmill version.
Figure 2. Gradual Web rendering.
The EnergyBrowser system allows the user to read and browse Web pages gradually, while walking or running on a treadmill. Thus, the system encourages the user to exercise more. To evaluate the effectiveness of the EnergyBrowser system, we exhibited our prototype system at an open house of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). In the next section, we will describe the field test.
3. FIELD TEST We exhibited our prototype system at the open house. About 500 people, from children to senior citizens, visited and tried our system. For the open house, we prepared URL lists from several subject areas, such as picture stories, comics, riddles, news, and weblogs. The visitors made their selections as jogging programs. We observed the behavior of the visitors and asked some of them to answer a questionnaire after they had tried the system. The questionnaire included the following items: z
Age and gender
z
Did you enjoy using the EnergyBrowser? (Scale of 1 - 5)
z
Would you want to use it in your house? (Scale of 1 - 5)
z
How long can you exercise? Please select from less than 5 minutes, less than 10 minutes, less than 20 minutes, less
Figure 3. Examples of the EnergyBrowser system. than 30 minutes, less than 60 minutes, or more than 60 minutes. z
What kind of content do you prefer?
z
What is your opinion about the EnergyBrowser system?
z
Have you ever used a sports gym? If you stopped going to the gym, why?
In addition, we interviewed visitors about our system. During the open house, 35 people - 20 males and 15 females answered the questionnaire. Their ages ranged from 6 to 71. The average value for the question, “Did you enjoy using the EnergyBrowser system?” was 4.42 (1 being worst, 5 being best), and for the question, “Would you want to use it in your own home?” the value was 4.21 (1 being worst, 5 being best). These
results indicate that people enjoyed using the EnergyBrowser system and would be interested in using it over a longer term. Figure 4 shows the results of these questions. Figure 5 shows the results for the question, “How long can you exercise?” The horizontal axis indicates the number of respondents. In this figure, most respondents fell into the category “more than 20 minutes and less than 30 minutes”. In addition, two-thirds of the respondents were able to exercise for more than 10 minutes. Picture-based content, such as stories and comics, were popular among children aged 15 or younger. In contrast, adults over 50 preferred text-based content, such as news. Most people liked riddles because seeing the question made them want to see the answer. This proves that intellectual stimulus made exercise fun. Some people suggested other types of content, such as animated cartoons, comic strips, movies, and travel pictures. It might be better to modify the conversion method to fit the content-type characteristics. For example, for comic strips, we could set the conversion rate lower for important scenes than for other scenes, and for movies, the burned energy could control playback speed. Six respondents answered that they had used sports gyms, and five had given up, in every case, because they were bored. Four of the five respondents answered that they would continue to exercise in gyms if the EnergyBrowser system was available. Some people were dissatisfied with the increment rate at which the Web pages were displayed; the rate was so low that they had to exercise too much to read the Web pages. This was because we used a fixed preset value, based on the conversion rate for adult males. It seems that the appropriate conversion rate value varies widely according to the user profiles. Some people also commented that the answers to the riddles were displayed while they were still thinking about the answer. When people are exercising on machines that allow them to control the exercise rate, such as the air-walker (see left of figure 3), they can instantly slow down the exercise pace while thinking about the answer. However, when the machine controls the exercise rate, such as the treadmill (see right of figure 3), it is difficult to adjust the pace. An automatic mechanism for adjusting the conversion rate will solve this problem. For example, for riddles, lowering the rate for answers, compared to the rate for questions, should work well. From the interviews, many people felt that intellectual stimulus would make exercise fun. However, some problems were also described. Some specific comments about our system were: z
It is awkward for users to browse the unnecessary parts such as menus, links, and advertisements and so on in news sites.
z
It is difficult for elderly people to browse Web pages designed using a small font size.
z
Most users got bored browsing very long text.
z
Just browsing through image content was not interesting enough because nothing was left to the imagination.
4. DISCUSSION Many users have tried the EnergyBrowser system and all of them enjoyed exercising and browsing. Some said that the Energy Browser system made boring exercise exciting because it encouraged them to exercise more in order to see what came next. Some users actually walked for an hour without difficulty.
18 Did you enjoy?
16
Would you want to use it in your house?
14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0 3.5 Score
4.0
4.5
5.0
Figure 4. The questionnaire results. 12
10
8
6
4
2
0 〜5min. 〜10min. 〜20min. 〜30min. 〜60min. 60min.〜
Figure 5. Exercise duration. Some visitors’ comments emphasized the importance of converting Web pages for the EnergyBrowser system. Figure 6 shows examples of site construction, such as news and weblog sites. In these figures, the gray areas are parts that are unnecessary for readers. Removing the unnecessary parts, for example, frames, banner advertisements, and navigation links would increase readability, as would enlarging the font size. The presentation of the Web pages is also important. Large font sizes and appropriate typefaces are required for legibility. Simplified structures are also preferable for the EnergyBrowser system because it automatically scrolls down the display area. We found some pages that could adjust the pace and volume of speech, typographically. They were very popular with users because incremental rendering makes it appear as though the speech is actually taking place. We are planning to improve the content conversion method that we use to modify the pages for greater legibility. We found that the presentation order is also very important. Figure 7 simplifies this presentation order problem. When we read the four-frame cartoons, which were constructed using TABLE elements similar to those in figure 7, a gradual Web rendering system serialized them as 3, 1, 4 and 2. This order makes it difficult to read the cartoons. To solve this problem, we will introduce the presentation elements (ex. the PAUSE element for stopping gradual rendering, the CLEAR element to clear the
display, and the SOUND element for embedding a sound) and attributes (ex. the ORDER attribute for the definition of presentation order, the WEIGHT attribute for the definition of presentation speed, and the RENDERING attribute for the method of gradual image rendering), as explained. Figure 8 shows an example of a news Web page. At first, it displays the title logo and news title with headline sound. Next, it gradually displays the body of the news. Finally, it clears the page and displays advertisements and a page footer, such as copyright notes, similar to the one at the beginning of this paper, before ending with a finishing sound. Link navigation is a problem in the EnergyBrowser system. The treadmill has no program menu that allows the user to change the direction of walking or running. The user controls only the speed. However, it should not be necessary to navigate links while jogging. The URL lists in the current implementation worked well. However, manually creating lists is inefficient so automatic generators of URL lists, such as read site summary (RSS) aggregators, would be useful. If link navigation is required, several functions could be integrated, such as link buttons, speech recognition, or an omni-direction treadmill. Yano et al. implemented the share walk environment using locomotion interfaces in order to encourage exercise [7]. IJsselsteijn at el. introduced the virtual coach to promote the incentive of fitness [6]. These approaches are relevant and we think that we can apply them to our system because these additional supports have an affinity to our system. We used a treadmill as the exercise machine but the system can be applied to other forms of exercise because a motion sensor is used to estimate the burned energy. Gyms provide a range of exercise machines, such as exercise bikes, aero-climbers (for climbing hills), benches and presses, but they all have the same problem; users get bored. However, the characteristics of the different types of exercise, for example, the exertion level and posture of the user, vary between machines. Therefore, we need to adjust the conversion rate and convert the pages into a style appropriate to the characteristics of the machine. There are numerous Web browsers for browsing pages on the WWW but they only render pages in their current state. In contrast, the EnergyBrowser system renders them in response to the users’ physical input. The feeling of controlling the browsing process is a very new and enjoyable experience. One possible side effect is that users may actually get a feel for the importance of the data or network because they have to walk or run harder to view pages with rich content. This effect might be beneficial to computer literacy education.
5. CONCLUSIONS We demonstrated the EnergyBrowser system at an open house to evaluate its effectiveness. We confirmed the viability of the system. In addition, we discussed the existing features and improvements of our system. We are examining conversion and display methods to make Web pages more legible and readable. We are also applying the EnergyBrowser system to other types of exercises, such as cycling, boxing, and bench presses, and are planning further experiments to evaluate its effectiveness.
Figure 6. Site construction examples. Left figure shows construction of a news site. Right figure shows construction of a weblog site.
Figure 7. Presentation examples of table content such as a four-frame cartoon.
Figure 8. Examples of presentation of news content.
6. REFERENCES [1] CompuTrainer, http://www.computrainer.com/. [2] KONAMI Corp., Dance Dance Revolution, http://www.konami.co.jp/am/ddr/. [3] Mokka S., Vaatahnen A. and Heinila, J. P., Valkkynen. Fitness Computer Game with a Bodily User Interface. In Proceedings of second conference on Entertainment Computing, pp. 1-3. [4] Nakamura S. Minakuchi M. Tanaka K., EnergyBrowser: Walking in the World Wide Web, HCII 2005, to appear. [5] NIKKEI National Geographic Japan, Fat, National Geographic, pp. 42-59, 2004 (in Japanese). [6] IJsselsteijn, W. A., de Kort, Y. A. W., Westerink, J., de Jager, M., Bonants, R.: Fun and Sports: Enhancing the Home Fitness Experience. Proc of ICEC 2004, pp. 46-56, 2004. [7] Yano H., Noma H., Iwata H., Miyasato T., Shared Walk Environment Using Locomotion Interfaces, Proc of ACM CSCW 2000.
