Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, Vol. 1, No. 4 (March 2015), 249-252

Combining playware exergaming with a mobile fitness app
Emmanouil Giannisakis, Henrik Hautop Lund
Centre for Playware, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
hhl@playware.dtu.dk
www.playware.dk

Abstract: We propose a novel playware as a merge between exergames and mobile fitness apps to engage the users inphysical exercises, not only as competitive play, but also in the form of cooperative play. The concept connects modular
interactive tiles with radio communication to Android tablets and smart phones, which can connect to the Internet. This
allows the players to monitor their playware exergaming performance on the smart device(s). A test was set up over 8 days
allowing two school classes to compete with each other on which class was going to collect the most points playing on themodular tiles during the test. The test subjects were from 6th and 7th grade (12-13 years old children). As a social playware,
we investigated how the playware mediated cooperative and competitive play amongst the users. It was found that themajority of game play involved social interaction between players, and that 8 out of 10 pupils on the top-10 were girls. Theplayware seemed to motivate the girls to become physically active.

Keywords: Playware, Exergaming, Mobile App, Modular Technology, Cooperative Play, Gender, Social Playware.

I. Introduction
Exergaming has been a popular area of research anddevelopment in recent year, for instance resulting ingames for health. Exergaming ("exercise" and "gaming")
is fitness gaming where video games provide exercise,and it may often rely on technology that tracks body
movement or reaction. Some exergames results from theresearch field of playware [1, 2], which has a coretechnology research activity focusing on research intomodular playware technology and its supporting
fundamental research areas of modern AI, adaptivity,modular robotics, and tangible interfaces. This iscombined with a deep knowledge of play and play
culture to create exergames that are fun, playful andmotivating for the users to engage with out of their own
free will and desire to play.
With the work presented here, we propose a novel
playware as a merge between the exergames and mobile
fitness apps to engage the users not only in competitiveplay, but also in cooperative play. We try to incorporate
both competitive and cooperative play, since wehypothesize that this may attract both genders, especiallyalso girls, to become physically active. Hence, we build a

simple mobile app for smart devices on top of a playware
tool (modular interactive tiles) – see Fig. 1 – with wellknown health benefits [3], and make a qualitative studyof the effect of the competitive and cooperative social
play that the mobile app adds to the playware tool.

Figure 1: The concept connects modular interactive tiles withradio via a board with XBee and Bluetooth to Android tabletsand smart phones, which can connect to the Internet (e.g. forstoring database). Players can choose games and player IDs on
the smart device(s) and monitor their performance on the smart
device(s).

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Copyright: the authors249

A system of modular robotic tiles was developed [4, 5]
and used extensively in physiotherapy and rehabilitation
using this platform as a form of exergaming, e.g. [6]. The
way the system works is that in the tiles different games
can be programmed and the patients are performing
physiotherapy exercises by playing these physicalinteractive games. A challenge for a system like themodular interactive tiles and other exergaming systems is
how they can motivate the users to keep playing.
Therefore we conducted a user testing in a school where
pupils from two classes acted as testers in order to see ifcompetition between the users, cooperation between theusers, seeing the score from a game and seeing the scorefrom the other players affected the motivation of thepupils to play.

II. Mobile App For Smart Devices
We developed a simple app to run on top of the modular
interactive tiles to provide feedback to the users on atablet (in a shared form) or a smart phone (privately).
When a user is playing a game on the modular interactivetiles, the system can monitor different variables such as
points, time, level, etc. These variables are provided tothe mobile app, which can provide feedback to the user
after the end of a game. The feedback provided to theuser consists of the following attributes:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

The points that the user got
The duration of the gameThe number of misses
The level of difficulty
The winner of the gameThe number of tiles that were used

the received message to the other radio module. The
tablet application sends messages that contain request for
the tiles to change the game to another one, while thetiles send messages that contain the feedback of thegame.

Figure 2. Arduino Uno with beeshielded Bluetooth and Xbee
bee.

The mobile app was developed to run on Androiddevices. It was developed to be able to run on both
Android tablets and Android smart phones. Thisapplication supports user creation, group creation andcompetition creation. In addition, it is connected with themodular interactive tiles so that the user can choose thegame that the user wants to play and to receive and store
the score from the game. With the tablet, more than one
user can play a game, and in that case the score is divided
by the number of users. The received score is being saved
in a local database. Finally, the users have access to theircurrent total score, the high score they have achieved foreach game as well as the current total score and the highscores of the other players.

III. User Testing Setup

Not all the attributes are relevant to every game. For
example the winner attribute is not being used in one
player games.
To simplify the setup of the experiment presented here,
we used an Arduino Uno board to facilitate thecommunication between the tiles, which communicate
with XBee, and the mobile device(s), which
communicate with Bluetooth. To the Arduino Uno board,
we attached a Bees shield with an Xbee radio module anda Bluetooth Bee module (see Fig. 2). The way we achievecommunication is that the master tile communicates withthe Xbee radio module of the Arduino board and themobile device is connected with Bluetoothcommunication with the Bluetooth Bee (see Fig. 1). The
Arduino Uno is responsible of receiving the messages
from one radio module and properly forward and modify

A test was set up over 8 days in the Oesterbrointernational school in Copenhagen, Denmark. The
premise of the test was that two classes were going tocompete with each other on which class was going tocollect the most points during the test. For this purpose
6th and 7th grade (12-13 years old children) was chosen
and they would compete with each other.
We provided the school with a set of 10 modular tiles (1master and 9 normal), a tablet with the tablet applicationand the Arduino board with the Bees shield.
The pupils had the chance to play with the tiles during
the breaks. The school had two break sessions: one from
09:35-09:55, and one from 11:45-12:05, i.e. two times 20
minutes per day. During those periods whoever of theparticipants who wanted to play could come, choose thePublished by Atlantis Press
Copyright: the authors
250

desired game and the other participants that they wanted
to play with (if they wanted to play with other people),and they would start playing. Hence, in total the pupils
could play for 8 days * 2 * 20 minutes/day.

IV. Results
Of the 33 active participants, 14 were male and 19 werefemale (i.e. 42.5% were male and 57.5% were female).
On average, each of the 33 participants played 29.2 times
and for 2.9 days. On average, each player played for1171 seconds during the testing with the most active
player to have played 4057 seconds. Out of the total 401
games that were played, 222 were played by groups ofpeople. The groups that were formed were consisting ofstudents of the same class. Table 1 shows the top 10players of the high score list at the end of the test. It isnoteworthy that from the ten players with the highest
total score 8 were female and 2 were males (the number
one player being male).
Table 1. The top 10 players at the end of the experiment. 80%of the top 10 players were female.

Player id

Total
sore

Total
Number ofduration
games
Gender4239342630

49

Female5346453679

117

Female195016

2423

38

Male

85112

2519

49

Female3954032680

85

Female

37

5419

3414

91

Female

95589

2178

38

Female

48

5989

2120

64

Female2760874057

91

Female557520

3201

94

Male

When looking more detailed at the play of the boys andthe girls, there are some significant differences. Most
notably, on average each participating girl played for a
total of 1464 seconds, while each participating boy, onaverage, played for a total of 774 seconds. Hence, eachgirl would play almost double as much as each boy.
Since the participants were free to come to the room toplay whenever they wanted during the breaks during the8 experiment days, it indicates that the girls wereattracted more to the playware game than the boys.

As a qualitative evaluation of the test, a research assistantmade observations during the intervention and madenotes of these observations. Three cases wererepresentative of the observations that were made during
the experiment: the pupils would engage in• Social, competitive play: groups wouldcooperate to achieve a higher group score thananother group• Social play to support individual competitiveplay: a group would form to help one individual
to gain a higher score• Individual competitive play: an individual would
compete against herself or another individual on
getting a higher score or reaching a specific goal

V. Discussion
Even if the collection and display of scores may seem topromote competitive play with focus on getting a higherscore, the results showed that more than 55% of the use(222 out of 401 games played) was group play withsocial interaction between the players, and girls
participated in 90% of these group plays. Even if theplayers tried to get a higher score, they did so in acooperative manner in the majority of cases. This may be
a contributing factor in explaining the relative highsuccess amongst the girls (the girls were twice as active
as the boys, and 8 out of 10 pupils on the top-10 weregirls), who may possibly enjoy the social, cooperativeplay. It is interesting that this playware motivated thegirls to become so physically active.
We may speculate that the relative high success of thisplayware with the girls may be attributed partly to thefacilitation of social, cooperative play in the competitive
game scenario. The modularity of the modular interactive
tiles facilitates social interaction by the physical layout of
the modules, and the games are designed so that players
can cooperate in the physical play. For instance, as moretiles are added to a platform of tiles, the more players canparticipate at the same time and cooperate to succeed in
the game. One example is the Final Countdown game inwhich the user(s) has to keep the platform ‘alive’. Eachtile is counting down its LEDs, but all LEDs on the tile
shine up again if the tile is being stepped on. If one tile in
the whole platform goes to zero LEDs on, then the gameis lost. The game can be played by one player, who willrush around on the tiles platform to keep all tiles alive,
but a group of players soon discovers that they can help
each other by each being in control of keeping a few ofthe tiles alive. So they distribute amongst each other thePublished by Atlantis Press
Copyright: the authors251task of keeping the whole platform alive. Other games
are designed in a similar fashion to allow social
interaction and cooperation amongst the players.
Research in play, toys, computer games, and robotic
games show that girls often tend to prefer cooperative
play and boys tend to prefer competitive play, e.g. [7, 8,9, 10]. It is therefore also interesting, that with thephysical interactive games, we can observe here that thefacilitation of social, cooperative play within acompetitive game scenario seem to attract the girls toengage in the play and to become physically active.
It suggests that the playware in this experiment becomesa mediator for playful social interaction. Indeed, social
playware has been defined as playware which aims at
creating playful social interaction between several users[11], see also [12]. With social playware, the starting
point for the research and development becomes thesocial interaction mediated by the technology rather than
the individual interaction mediated by the technology. In
the present case, the results suggest that users – boys andgirls – become physically active in a social way withsocial playware like the one which was carefully
designed for the present experiment in the form ofmodular interactive tiles with a mobile app for bothcooperative and competitive play.

[4] Lund, H. H. “Modular Robotics for PlayfulPhysiotherapy”. In Proceedings of IEEE International
Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, IEEE Press, 571575, 2009.
[5] US Patent No: 8,241,183. “Modular robotic tiles forphysical interaction”, 2012.
[6] Nielsen, C. B. and Lund, H. H. “Adapting Playware
to Rehabilitation Practices”. International Journal ofComputer Science in Sport, 11:1, 2012.
[7] Leaper, C. “Gender, affiliation, assertion, and theinteractive context of parent-child play”. Developmental
Psychology, 36, 381-393, 2000.
[8] Dawson, C., Cragg, A., Taylor, C., and Toombs, B.
“Video games: research to improve understanding ofwhat players enjoy about video games, and to explain
their preferences for particular games”. British Board ofFilm Classification, 2007.
[9] Lund, H. H. and L. Pagliarini, L. “LEGO Mindstorms
Robot Soccer”. In Proceedings of RoboCup’98, LNAI
1604, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1999.
[10] Lund, H. H. “Adaptive Robotics in Entertainment”.
Applied Soft Computing, 1:1, 2001.
[11] Lund, H. H. and T. Thorsteinsson, T. “Socialplayware for mediating teleplay interaction overdistance”. International Journal Artificial Life andRobotics, 16:4, 435-440, 2012.
[12] Suzuki, K. “Social Playware: Device-mediatedsocial interaction for therapeutic activities.” Robot andHuman Interactive Communication, 2014 RO-MAN: The
23rd IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, 2014.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank colleagues from theCenter for Playware, DTU for collaboration, help anddiscussions related to the experiment presented here.
Also, the authors would like to thank the participating
children and teachers at Oesterbro International School,
Denmark.

References[1] H. H. Lund, T. Klitbo, and C. Jessen, C. “Playware
Technology for Physically Activating Play”, Artificial
Life and Robotics Journal, 9:4, 165-174, 2005.
[2] H. H. Lund, and P. Marti. “Designing Modular
Robotic Playware”. In Proc. of 18th IEEE Int.
Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive
Communication (Ro-Man 2009), IEEE Press, 115-121,2009.
[3] Lund, H. H., and Jessen, J. Effects of Short-Term
Training of Community-Dwelling Elderly with ModularInteractive Tiles, Games for Health Journal, 3:5, 2014.

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