Samenvatting

The project ‘Exergaming for active healthy ageing and rehabilitation’ (EXACT) aims to develop a new generation exergames for the elderly to help them stay active in general and as an exercise tool in rehabilitation settings in particular. This is important because the elderly population is outgrowing the number of people working in health care, making it necessary to develop and use technology to be able to give health services to a growing number of elderly with a declining number of health staff.
The current student project served as preparation for an experimental study that aims to study movements, postural changes, and brain activity during exergaming. To this end, all the separate pieces of hardware that will be used during data collection – exergame, force plates, EEG, and Microsoft Kinect v2 – have to start in a synchronized manner. Therefore, a controller was constructed to communicate with the various software to start and stop data acquisition from the hardware. During development, the various options for exergames and the hardware used in the experiment were also looked into. Furthermore, a method was developed for skeletal and point cloud collection from the Microsoft Kinect v2.
During development and the search for a usable exergame, several important aspects related to limiting factors of the EEG machine and force plates were encountered. Furthermore, it turned out that the Microsoft Kinect v2 could not be used as part of the gaming system, but was instead used to capture movements.
The resulting system that was built in the current student project allows for all the hardware pieces to have a synchronized start for data acquisition. All the collected data can be analysed and used for further research in the field of exergaming.