The program uses a camera and software and corrects the trainee's mistakes in real time
In a typical yoga class, students watch their teacher and learn how to correct their posture to perform a pose correctly. But what if the student is partially or completely blind, unable to see exactly what they need to do? A team of American computer science researchers has created a groundbreaking software program that tracks the movements of a blind student while verbally explaining to them what they need to correct in their posture.
The program, called “Eyes-Free Yoga,” was created by researchers at the University of Washington, led by software engineer Kyle Rector, and was presented at the SIGACCESS international computer conference in the US.
The program uses the Microsoft Kinect camera and software to record body movements and then provide real-time spoken instructions through the speakers so that the practitioner can adjust their arms, legs, neck, back, etc. For example, the program “sees” the blind yoga student doing something wrong and immediately tells them to “turn your shoulders to the left” or “lean to the side and left.”.
Essentially, the program creates a virtual yoga "teacher," allowing visually impaired people to interact with them during exercises. For each of the common yoga poses, the program has about 30 spoken instructions for correction and improvement.
The developers worked with yoga teachers to incorporate the appropriate advice into the software they developed (in fact, the program has also provided for the pronunciation of positive phrases that confirm and reward someone for their correct posture). Rector herself did a lot of yoga to have personal experience, so that she could 'write' the best possible code for her program.
Subsequent tests with blind people in yoga classes confirmed the software's usefulness and success. The researchers plan to make their technology available online, so interested users can download the program, connect it to their Kinect, and start their yoga practice.
Source: protothema.gr
