Gamification of a system for real time monitoring of posture

In this paper the gamification of a system for monitoring bad postural behavior is presented. The system is designed having children as main target users. Bad posture is a known cause of possible severe disorders in childhood and, in the worst-case scenario, may entail permanent spinal deviations. The developed system consists of two main components: a device equipped with inertial sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope), which are able to measure the patient's spinal curvature, and a Game Engine plugin (Unity3D and Udk) that provides the reading of the device data and through which the game programmer can link the posture information to a game variable such as: life count, number of enemies, energy and so on. If the player is in a bad posture, he gets negative feedback during the game, which affects the value of the associated variable.