ESPRIT: Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool

We propose to develop ESPRIT: an Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool, in support of NASA's effort in developing crew exercise technologies for astronaut health and fitness. ESPRIT is a single camera system that monitors the exercise activities of the crew, detects markers placed on the body and other image features, recovers 3D kinematic information of the human body pose, and compiles statistical data about the exercise activities. There are two main challenges for motion capture using a single camera: (1) lack of depth information, and (2) partial occlusion of parts of the body. To overcome these challenges, the proposed framework relies on strong priors on human body pose, shape, and motion dynamics to resolve pose ambiguities. Besides marker locations, it extracts other image features that provide additional cues for recovering pose. It combines both discriminative and generative approaches to achieve robust pose estimation and tracking performance.

Non-NASA applications include uses in medicine and rehabilitation, such as gait analysis, orthopedics, and other applications for monitoring skeletal movement. Other applications include personal fitness and support of the aging, human-robotics and human-computer interaction, simulation, immersive reality, and video games. Potential customers include government research agencies such as Air Force Research Laboratory for human performance analysis and human factor engineering; National Institute of Health for rehabilitation research; physiotherapy clinics and nursing homes for patient monitoring, and sports equipment manufacturers for biomechanics studies. The development of a low cost motion capture system would open a wide range of opportunities in markets where conventional motion capture systems are too expensive.

Crew exercise is important for maintaining health and fitness of astronauts, especially in preventing adverse health problems associated with long-duration space flight, such as losses in muscle strength and endurance, bone density, balance and aerobic capacity. The proposed ESPRIT system will support NASA's Exercise Countermeasure project for observing crew's exercise activities, performing motion capture and kinematic analysis, and will contribute towards the understanding the effect of microgravity in physical activities. ESPRIT is designed to satisfy the constraints in size, weight and power consumption imposed by the spacecraft environment. The system will be easy to set up and operated by the crew.

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