Making Automatic Movement Features Extraction Suitable for Non-engineer Students

Analysis of movement expression is a multidisciplinary research domain, that exploits the contributions from a wide variety of research fields, ranging from biomedical, computer science and robotic engineering, moving through psychology, to dance and performing arts. That is why there is the need to make tools also accessible to students and researchers with a non-technical background to foster their insights and facilitate their contribution. Since corpora are usually multi-modal, when they come as motion capture (MoCap) data, they could be quite difficult to analyze and annotate by people with a non-technical background. Therefore, the present work shows the prototype of a software tool that collects a library of algorithms, to process raw MoCap data. The tool allows the user to extract movement features through an easy workflow, interacting with a user-friendly graphical interface (GUI). The GUI usability has been preliminary user-tested with participants having different expertise in human movement features extraction. During the execution of three tasks, users' attitudes have been collected to assess GUI's ease of use and we found that it is perceived as a useful tool, but it requires basic previous knowledge to be fully understood.