Treffer: A Hand-Gesture-Controlling Exergame System for Hypertension Precautions.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), high blood pressure or hypertension is the current biggest risk for people around the world. It is known that blood pressure can be lowered by performing isometric handgrip exercises using a foam ball. Then, an exergame of playing a video game while conducting a handgrip exercise using it can be helpful for people suffering from the high blood pressure to repeat them in daily lives. In this paper, based on this motivation, we present a hand-gesture-controlling exergame system for hypertension precautions. The system runs a conventional personal computer with a browser and a camera. We define four simple hand gestures with a foam ball that can be effective in lowering the blood pressure and implement a Python program using Mediapipe library to recognize each gesture to control the video games. For evaluations, we applied the proposed system to 40 persons in Indonesia and 10 persons in Japan who may suffer from hypertension, and measured their blood pressures before and after the exercise. Their comparison results validated the effectiveness in lowering the blood pressure by the proposal. Besides, the System Usability Scale (SUS) score calculated from the questionnaire results to 10 questions confirmed the system usability and preferences by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]