Mobile Exergames - Burn Calories While Playing Games on a Smartphone

Exergames combine exercising with game play by requiring the users to perform some kind of physical activity (and exercise) in order to score points in the game. In this paper, we present a novel mobile exergaming framework, which requires the users to physically move and jump in order to score points in a game that is played on a smartphone. Our system uses a custom designed Exercising Pad (called ExerPad) in order to track the user's physical movement, and then automatically updates the corresponding game character's position on the screen. The ExerPad contains different shaped images, which are captured from the smartphone's inbuilt camera, and are automatically detected by our shape detection algorithm. We also use the smartphone's inbuilt accelerometer and gyroscope to detect other physical movements from the user such as jumping, turning etc. The experimental results show that the proposed mobile exergames helps its users to burn calories and have fun at the same time.