An Extension of Handgrip Exergame System for Hypertension Improvement with Two-Hand Gestures

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hypertension is a significant global health issue, affecting approximately 1.28 billion people worldwide. On this issue, it is known that handgrip exercises utilizing a foam ball can effectively lower the blood pressure. To facilitate them engagingly in daily lives, we have developed an exergame system on a personal computer with a camera, where a user plays video games using hand gestures. A Python-program using Mediapipe was implemented to recognize the defined hand gestures for game controls. In the previous system, only one hand was considered for hand gestures. Then, some gestures become too complex to be performed by seniors. Besides, the correspondence between a gesture and its input operation is not intuitive so that a player often makes wrong operations. In this paper, we present an extension of the exergame system by adopting newly defined hand gestures using two hands. To make the correspondence intuitive, the right hand is used for the right movement, for example. The validity evaluations of the proposal will be in future works.