PROJECT TITLE :

3-D Streaming Supplying Partner Protocols for Mobile Collaborative Exergaming for Health

ABSTRACT:

Childhood obesity is nowadays considered one of the major health problems that many societies suffer from today. The obesity epidemic leads to several life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and loneliness just to mention a few. Several approaches, including physical exercises, strict diet, and exergames among others, have been adopted to address the obesity epidemic. Exergames are considered the innovative approach for fighting several health problems such as obesity, where a combination of “exercise” and 3-D “gaming” are proposed to incite kids to exercise as a team. Collaborative exergaming became even more popular given that it addresses the social side of the obesity epidemic, and it motivates kids to socialize with other kids. Traditional exergames are based on the client-server approach where the server is responsible for streaming the 3-D environment. However, this can lead to latency and server bottleneck if many clients participate in the exergame, which leads to the kids stopping exercising. Having an exergame application that does not suffer from NetWorking problem such as delay, is very important given that it increases the exercise hours. In this paper, we propose a new trend of mobile collaborative exergaming applications that is based on the peer-to-peer architecture, as well as two supplying partner selection protocols that aim at selecting the suitable source responsible for streaming the relevant 3-D data. Our system, that we refer to as MOSAIC, is intended for mobile collaborative exergames that incite kids to move inside a large area, using thin mobile devices such as head-mounted devices, have physical exercises, and collaborate with other kids which in consequence address several health problems such as the obesity epidemic on the physical and social plans. Our proposed mobile collaborative exergame aims at inciting t-
e kids to exercise as a team for a longer time by improving the quality of the streaming and reducing the delay. This is accomplished by our proposed supplying partner selection protocols that provide a quick discovery of multiple supplying partners, by minimizing the time required to acquire the data. The performance evaluation that we have obtained to evaluate our suite of protocols using a realistic set of exergame scenarios for obese kids is then presented and discussed.