Jan – May 2016
A low-cost wearable project that socializes workouts to help people reach their healthiest, happiest selves. Play a round of PAC-MAN controlled via push ups. A Jacobs Institute promoted project.
Created in collaboration with Pedro Martinez, Will Porter, and Eric Schade
Pac-Man is a action maze chase video game with simple inputs traditionally using arrow keys on a computer or a joystick to move the synonymous character up, down, left, or right.
We wanted to encourage a healthy lifestyle through a collaborative fitness game. Teams of two had to work together acting as the arrow keys via the push up gesture.
We explored different methods to capture kinesiological activity. The acceleration of the arm via push up press was a discrete mechanism to track intentional user input.
Workout as a team of two. Each player’s push up gesture denotes a plyometric input. One player controls up-down, the other left-right.
For Pec-Man we built a Adafruit tri-axis armband using a mBed ARM controller and a 3D printed housing to identify when a user activated their arms for a push up press up or down.
We envisioned that Pac-Man could be integrated into a mobile app and tied to a simple everyday armband. Games could expand to include other classic arcade games as well.
We investigated various bio-input mechanisms for research. These included gait tracking and muscle activation through motion capture (ImageJ) and electromyography (EMG) sensors respectively.