A natural user interface to integrate citizen science and physical exercise

Abstract

Citizen science enables volunteers to contribute to scientific projects, where massive data collection and analysis are often required. Volunteers participate in citizen science activities online from their homes or in the field and are motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Here, we investigated the possibility of integrating citizen science tasks within physical exercises envisaged as part of a potential rehabilitation therapy session. The citizen science activity entailed environmental mapping of a polluted body of water using a miniature instrumented boat, which was remotely controlled by the participants through their physical gesture tracked by a low-cost markerless motion capture system. Our findings demonstrate that the natural user interface offers an engaging and effective means for performing environmental monitoring tasks. At the same time, the citizen science activity increases the commitment of the participants, leading to a better motion performance, quantified through an array of objective indices. The study constitutes a first and necessary step toward rehabilitative treatments of the upper limb through citizen science and low-cost markerless optical systems.

Spatial memory training in a citizen science context

“…Our results demonstrate that the training system is perceived as interesting and entertaining by a group of healthy adult subjects, in agreement with our expectations based on previous work on the integration of citizen science activities and science learning in physical rehabilitation [17,42,60]. While the subjects did not execute the task on a voluntary basis as the participants of the Brooklyn Atlantis project [44], they were informed of the overall scientific objectives of the project and of the value of the contribution to authentic research in environmental science.…”

“…A wide range of motivational drivers influences the contribution of volunteers to citizen science projects, including individual interest in the subject of the project and excitement that they experience in contributing to research [57,73,65,16]. We recently demonstrated [17,42,60] that the field of rehabilitation can benefit from the motivational incentives afforded by citizen science, whereby citizen science activities can be effectively integrated in a computer-mediated physical rehabilitation. Specifically, subjects undergoing rehabilitation treatments in which their physical activity contributes to a citizen science project or, simply, some form of science learning show improved adherence to rehabilitation regimens and a better per-formance in motor tasks [42].…”

Social Information as a Means to Enhance Engagement in Citizen Science‐Based Telerehabilitation

“…However, each rehabilitation patient has unique severity and comorbidity (Ween et al, 1996), and our choice of device may not be suitable for some patients. An alternative would be an application of visionbased motion sensing such as Kinect (Chang, Chen, & Huang, 2011;Palermo et al, 2017;Webster & Celik, 2014). In free motion, however, patients may practice ineffective or adverse movements without close supervision by therapists.…”

“…Indeed, our previous work has demonstrated that rehabilitation patients showed a preference for physical activity that involved environmental monitoring, compared to a simple game without scientific content, even though citizen science required more effort (Laut, Cappa, Nov, & Porfiri, 2015). Integrating scientific contents into physical activity also resulted in improved motion performance through more accurate data collection, possibly driven by an incentive of a contribution to science (Palermo, Laut, Nov, Cappa, & Porfiri, 2017).…”

Applying Citizen Science to Gene, Drug, Disease Relationship Extraction from Biomedical Abstracts

“…Citizen science is a form of crowdsourcing in which non-professional scientists voluntarily engage in different degrees of data collection, analysis, and/or dissemination of a scientific project (Haklay, 2013). The scalability of citizen science has enabled researchers to collect, process, and analyze unprecedented volumes of data leading to advances in conservation and environmental science (Schmiedel, 2016)(McKinley et al, 2017, astronomy (Banfield et al, 2016) (Kuchner et al, 2016)(Straub, 2016, biomedical research (Candido dos Reis et al, 2015)(Luengo-Oroz, Arranz and Frean, 2012) (Kim et al, 2014), and more (Williams et al, 2014) (Palermo et al, 2017). Crowdsourcing and citizen science has previously been applied towards NER of disease mentions via a platform called Mark2Cure (M2C), and found that in aggregate, annotations submitted by trained citizen scientists were on par with expert annotators (Good et al, 2015) (Tsueng et al, 2016).…”