Wednesday, May 25, 2016
With fists at chin level, a young video game player focuses on the television in front of him. He begins shadow boxing, throwing a series of punches and kicks. Meanwhile, on the screen, an animated character engaged in hand-to-hand combat faithfully reproduces all of the player’s punches and kicks in real time.
The player is not holding a controller. Instead, his movements are captured by Microsoft Kinect, a motion-detecting component of the Xbox gaming system. Kinect’s built-in camera and depth sensor use “computer vision” that allows the player to use his entire body as a controller. For gamers, Kinect turns video game play into a full-body experience, with all of the excitement and none of the danger.
But for a group of University of Iowa researchers, Kinect is not a game—it’s a tool to help understand how infections spread in health care settings. By employing Kinect’s computer vision in a hospital room, the research team is pioneering an automated approach to track interactions between health care workers and patients, capturing previously elusive data to support the work of hospital epidemiologists.