ESPRIT: Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool

Crew exercise is important for maintaining the health and fitness of astronauts, and to prevent adverse health problems, such as bone density losses. We developed algorithms for ESPRIT: an Exercise Sensing and Pose Recovery Inference Tool, in support of NASA's Exercise Countermeasure Program. ESPRIT is a stereo camera system that monitors exercise activities, detects markers placed on the body and other image features and recovers 3D kinematic body pose. ESPRIT relies on strong prior knowledge and modeling of human body, pose, dynamics, and appearance. It also relies on advanced statistical inference techniques to achieve robust and accurate motion capture. Phase I result has been promising and has demonstrated motion capture of several exercises, including walking, curling and dead lifting. Phase II effort will focus on enhancement of algorithms, development of an ESPRIT prototype, detailed performance evaluation, and delivery of prototype for testing and demonstration.

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.

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

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