A WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR

CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION

Min-Chieh Hsiao, Navid Amini and Majid Sarrafzadeh

University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, U.S.A.

Keywords: eHealth, Exercise, Childhood Obesity, Home Automation.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel childhood obesity prevention system called No Pain No Game which aims at

encouraging children to fit physical exercise into their daily life; the more entertainment they demand, the

more exercise they have to perform. The proposed system evaluates children’s activity level and assigns

them corresponding amount of home entertainment time such as television viewing or playing video games.

This way, children can obtain a sense of achievement, while parents can save the time without manually

controlling the corresponding entertainment appliances. No Pain No Game gives parents full wireless

control over the home’s power outlets without obliging them to struggle with their children. Furthermore,

through No Pain No Game’s software interface, children are able to extend their home entertainment time

without the presence of their parents.

1 INTRODUCTION

People are becoming more concerned of the problem

of childhood obesity, when excess body fat

negatively affects child’s health. Childhood obesity

is recognized as a serious public health concern due

to the rising prevalence of obesity in children

(Troiano 1995). In the United States, direct

measurements of body mass and height obtained by

the National Health and Nutrition Examination

Survey indicates that about 15% of 6–19 year olds

are classified as overweight (Ogden 2002). As the

children spend a significant amount of their time at

home, sedentary lifestyle accounts for the leading

cause of childhood obesity (Walker 1998). Many

children fail to exercise because they spend time

doing stationary activities such as playing video

games or watching TV. Certain reports provided

evidence that television viewing is a reason for

increased body fatness and that reducing television

viewing is a promising strategy for preventing

childhood obesity (Andersen 1998, Robinson 1998).

On the other hand, exercise would help children

control their weight. It also helps to reduce the risk

of some illnesses such as high blood pressure, heart

disease, sleep problems, and other similar disorders

(Freedman 1993). Based on the mentioned facts, it is

widely recommended that one should undergo at

least 30 minutes of moderate exercise five times a

week (Sallis 1994, Pate 1998, Corbin 1994).

Furthermore, it is reported that standards for

recommended pedometer-determined steps per day

for 6–12 year olds are 12,000 for girls and 15,000

for boys (Tudor-Locke 2004) which highlights the

importance of physical activity for children.

Accordingly, many parental control units have been

implemented in games and appliances in an effort to

encourage children to perform physical exercise.

Using these units, parents can limit the time that

their children can spend on playing computer or TV

games by manually controlling the corresponding

appliances using the GUI provided by these units

(Thompson 2006, Coshott 2007). However, the units

are not capable of preventing children from

watching another channel or playing another game

that is not equipped with the parental control option.

In this paper, the proposed system can mitigate

the previously mentioned problem by controlling

power outlets instead of controlling certain TV

channels or particular games. It has been several

years since the introduction of smart homes. In such

homes, RF signals from special controllers are

exploited to activate or deactivate power outlets. In

some cases, the controller is able to regulate the

intensity of room light as well. A number of research

projects have been carried out based on these or

similar controllers to build smart homes (Cook 2003,

Jiang 2000, Cole 2002). Likewise, a certain type of

Hsiao M., Amini N. and Sarrafzadeh M. (2010).

A WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, pages 75-81

DOI: 10.5220/0002711300750081

 SciTePress

RF power controller is used in this project in order

to acquire a complete control over the home’s power

outlets. In addition, a wireless sensor is utilized,

which can calculate the travelled distance and

average pace for a walk (or a run) so as to monitor

the daily activity level of children. The recorded data

can later be uploaded to any computer via the USB

interface. The goal of the proposed system is to

make a virtual connection between power outlets

and wireless activity monitor sensor. This way, the

children could be encouraged to do more exercise in

exchange for more time of home entertainment (e.g.,

watching TV). The more exercise children perform,

the more time they secure to do stationary activities.

The proposed system, called No Pain No Game, is

intended to prevent childhood obesity disease and

thus, improve childhood fitness level.

The remainder of the paper is organized as

follows. Section 2 provides a brief overview of

related work in the context of home automation and

childhood obesity prevention. Preliminary notions

followed by structure of No Pain No Game system

are covered in Section 3. The important features of

the system are summarized in Section 4. Finally,

Section 5 concludes this study and highlights future

research directions.

2 RELATED WORK

There are several research projects based on the

home automation systems. As an example,

MavHome smart home architecture developed at the

University of Texas at Arlington, allows a home to

act as an intelligent agent (Cook 2003). In

MavHome system, s sensor network including light,

humidity, temperature, smoke, gas, motion, infrared,

and switches is developed to keep track of the home

environment. Based on the data collected from the

sensor network, a server makes the decision for

resource management and executes the decision

through the smart actuators (e.g., x10 ActiveHome

Kit) with which the appliances in the home are

equipped. Generally, the MavHome aims at

maximizing the inhabitant’s comfort and

productivity, and minimizing costs. For elderly and

disabled people, the system can provide a fine health

care and a higher level of security. As another

example, to help people with disabilities, Jiang et al.

designed a voice-activated environmental control

system which consists of a universal remote control

with X10 home automation capability, a Motorola

6811 microprocessor, and an off-the-shelf voice

recognition circuit (Jiang 2000).

In the context of activity monitoring, in a

number of projects, X10 components are integrated

into a toolkit which is intended to monitor the daily

activity of an individual (Cole 2002). In addition to

the home automation systems, certain appliances are

developed to encourage children’s exercise. For

example, an interrupter system can be added to an

existing connection between a game console and its

controller (Coshott, 2007). The interrupter system is

used selectively to enable and interrupt the modified

connection between the game controller and the

game console in dependence upon the detected

operation of the exercise machine. Accordingly, the

parents can arrange it in such a way that their

children cannot play normally on the game console

unless the child performs an adequate amount of

exercise on the exercise machine.

In (Annavaram 2008), a wireless body area

network is developed for wearable monitoring

applications and the intended use of the system is to

avoid pediatric obesity. The network is composed of

heterogeneous sensors (e.g., heart rate sensor and

accelerometer sensor) and the goal is to

automatically recognize, predict and reason about

human physical activity and behaviour states by the

evaluation of multimodal sensing and interpretation.

3 THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

No Pain No Game is a home automation system that

encourages children’s daily exercise by rewarding

them with more home entertainment time. In other

words, the time children spend doing stationary

activities should be proportional to the time they

spend doing physical exercise. Aside from the

interface software, the system is composed of three

parts: a sports kit which monitors the exercise

records, a controller which commands the power

outlets and a database which stores the health

statistics and exercise records of children. The

current version of the system exploits Nike + iPod

Sport Kit as a means to monitor the physical

exercise. It also uses X10-based devices in the shape

of controllable power outlet modules in order to

acquire full control over different entertainment

appliances. Microsoft Access databases are utilized

to store the related exercise data. The software that

connects these three parts was written in Visual

Basic and C Sharp focused on Windows platform.

3.1 X10 Standards

X10 is an international and open industry standard

BIODEVICES 2010 - International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices

for communication among electronic devices used

for home automation. It primarily uses power line

wiring for signalling and control, where the signals

involve brief radio frequency bursts representing

digital information. A wireless radio protocol is also

defined, where the data packets are very similar to

those used for power line wires. The operating

frequency of the wireless protocol is 433 MHz and

310 MHz in the European systems and U.S. systems,

respectively. It should be noted that the wireless

protocol allows the operation of keypad remote

controllers on top of the underlying wired X10

modules.

X10 is popular in the home environment with

millions of units in use worldwide, and inexpensive

availability of new components. Figure 1 illustrates

a typical configuration for X10 network.

Figure 1: A typical configuration for X10 controlled

appliances.

By using The ActiveHome Pro Scripting

Interface provided by X10, one can create softwares,

web pages and other tools that use the USB Interface

to control and interact with X10 modules, sensors,

and remote controls (The ActiveHome Pro SDK

from X10). The address of each module is set by the

dials located on it. Accordingly, one can command

the interface to turn on the intended module by

providing the valid address corresponding to the

module. Upon receiving a command (e.g., from a

remote control), the interface reports the action of

receiving the command which enables the user to

benefit from certain options. For the sake of more

reliability, each packet is sequentially sent twice to

make sure the receivers understand it even in the

presence of power line noise.

3.2 Nike + iPod Sport Kit

Nike + iPod Sport Kit (Figure 2) consists of a

wireless sensor and a small wireless receiver which

plugs into an iPod. The sensor is a piezoelectric

accelerometer pedometer that fits inside special Nike

shoes and a wireless receiver that will be connected

to iPod. Each sensor has its unique serial number

which is used as an identification number for each

child in the proposed system. The personal training

application on iPod can provide information on

distance and speed while listening to music. By

considering the number of steps taken and elapsed

time, the users (children) can schedule their desired

workout in the form a specified distance or a certain

time period that can fit a plan based upon their goals

and their previous performance. The exercise

records are stored in files with XML format. The

proposed system will upload those files to the server

and extract the useful data from the files. Therefore,

the data can be analyzed to decide how much

entertainment time is going to be earned by the

child.

Figure 2: Apple Nike + iPod Sport Kit.

3.3 The Proposed No Pain No Game

System

In the proposed system, a server is maintained by

parents while children will use remote controls

sending matching signals to trigger the appliances. A

child must register his or her sports kit on the server,

given that every sensor has a particular identification

number. The proposed system simultaneously

analyzes the current exercise records when children

update the database with new exercise records by

just plugging their iPod into the client computer.

This means that the server automatically calculates

the total time budget a child is allowed to use his/her

intended appliances (e.g., TV). A formula is applied

to derive the time budget based on the calories

burned by the child:

, ×

200

× 3.5 ×

= T

wMETs

Calories

(1)

where MET (Metabolic Equivalent of Task) is a

physiological concept that shows how intense the

exercise is (Dr Gily’s Health Portal), w is the child’s

weight in kilograms and T represents the total

duration of exercise (e.g., run or walk) in minutes.

A WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION

Figure 3: Structure and applications of No Pain No Game.

MET expresses the energy cost of physical

activities as multiplies of Resting Metabolic Rate

(RMR) and is defined as the ratio of metabolic rate

(and therefore, the rate of energy consumption)

during a certain physical activity to a reference rate

of metabolic rate at rest (quiet sitting), set by

convention to 3.5 ml O

. kg

-1

. min

-1

or equivalently

1 kcal.kg

-1

.hr

-1

. By convention 1 MET is considered

as the resting metabolic rate obtained during quiet

sitting. MET values of physical activities range from

0.9 (sleeping) to 18 (running at 17.5 km/h). It should

be noted that the MET value for watching television

is 1 and for walking at the speed of 3.2 km/h is about

2 (Metabolic Equivalent 2009).

After the burned calories are derived, a basic

requirement for this value is enforced. If the amount

of burned calories is less than a certain quantity

(called basic requirement), no time budget will be

granted. However, if it exceeds the basic

requirement, the basic amount of time budget will be

given, and also extra time will be granted depending

on the bonus rate and the overhead. The required

amount of the calories, the amount of the basic and

extra time budget can all be adjusted by the Account

Management Interface.

The total time budget for each child is stored in

the database of type Microsoft Access. The time

budget gets verified and consumed every time a

child tries to activate an appliance. Moreover, after

the time budget runs out, the server will

automatically turn off the related appliance (e.g.,

TV). A child has to perform more exercise and plug

his/her iPod afterwards into the client computer in

order to increase the time budget again. Figure 3

illustrates the structure of No Pain No Game system.

The implementation of the system is constructed

with two ends (Figure 3). On one end, the program

on client computers will parse iPod exercise records

by creating XML readers supported by the .NET

Framework. After validation, the files will be sent to

the server unless they are expired. On the other end,

the server will increase the corresponding time

budget by an appropriate formula based on

children’s BMI and exercise records. The server also

verifies whether the sensor identification number of

the record is valid and also it makes sure that the

record is not outdated. Meanwhile, if one wants to

Management) or to verify the status of all children,

the server can update or retrieve the data as required

(see system’s block diagram shown in Figure 4).

Figure 4: System’s block diagram.

Moreover, the server handles the events when

the Power Control Module (Active Home

BIODEVICES 2010 - International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices

Figure 6: A typical screenshot of the client GUI in No Pain No Game.

Automation System interface) receives signals from

remote controls. Each received signal will be

mapped to a particular child and the module he/she

requested. Therefore, the server can retrieve the

corresponding data and determine if it should send a

command (“sendrf” in this case) to the automation

system in order to trigger the requested module. In

addition, for each appliance, there is a timer in the

server to update and monitor the available time

budget and correspondingly, to turn off the

appliance when the corresponding time budget is

exhausted. The detailed block diagram of the server

is depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Detailed block diagram of the server.

4 SYSTEM FEATURES

Since each child has his/her own iPod + Nike Sport

Kit, the system can distinguish between different

children by evaluating their identification numbers.

Furthermore, the system takes into account the date

of exercise records to avoid copies of previous

exercise records from being taken into consideration.

This validation process prevents children from

cheating to some extent. For example, a child will

not gain any extra time budget by plugging the iPod

twice with the same exercise record.

As it can be seen in Figure 6, a user-friendly

GUI on client computers is provided for children to

use so that they can easily learn how to update the

exercise records without any difficulty. Furthermore,

the system allows the children to watch TV or to use

other entertainment appliances, only if they have

performed sufficient amount of exercise throughout

the day. This gives the children a sense of

achievement while the parents would not have to

worry about their kids not being active enough.

Meanwhile, the parents can save the time and let

the system monitor the activity level of their

children and the status of the entertainment

A WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION

Figure 7: An example table of the exercise data.

appliances. They can view the previous data (e.g.,

how many calories have been burned) and observe

the progress of their children’s fitness level. Figure 7

shows an example table containing the child’s recent

exercise data. This exercise table is accessible from

the server.

5 DISCUSSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In the current form of the proposed system, after

performing exercise, a child connects the iPod to the

client computer. This will update a database on the

server and eventually a new schedule for the related

appliances will be sent to the ActiveHome

Automation System from the server. However, it is

more desirable to make the system real-time, where

the updating process is done automatically and

wirelessly. This can be done through using a

Bluetooth adapter connected to the iPod. This way,

there will be no need for the child to connect the

iPod to the computer in order to extend his/her time

budget.

Apart from Nike + iPod Sport Kit, other types of

sport kits can be added to the system in future to

provide the children with more options to perform

physical exercise. Also it should be noted that the

server side and client side of the system (Section 3.3

and Figure 3) can run on two networked computers

or they can run on a single machine.

A new method of gaming can be designed in

order to make players benefit from doing physical

exercise in the real world. This can be achieved by

extending the system to a server maintained by game

companies. Similar to the design for the Home

Automation System, the system now reward the

children who have performed sufficient amount of

exercise with the profit in the game. For example, a

child’s character in the game becomes stronger and

therefore, will able to equip better weapons. It is

anticipated that this idea gives encouraging

incentives for children in exchange for performing

physical exercise.

No Pain No Game can also cooperate with a

children’s health organization to advocate

formulating an exercise plan, encouraging children

by a record competition on the organization’s

website. A child can upload his/her exercise

progress and get ranked, accordingly. Further, the

exercise data collected from children can be a-useful

resource for related research institutes. People in

health related organizations can analyze how the

trend of health data during the exercise progress.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Childhood obesity has been a public concern as

people tend to expend more money in order to let

their children maintain physical fitness and overall

health. As such, it is necessary to build an

application that continually encourages children to

perform physical exercise. Several parental control

units have been designed, but few of them can

effectively impact children. With home automation

system technology ever improving and with the

number of related research projects growing, the

proposed system is built on the idea of home

automation systems. In this system, called No Pain

No Game, children have to perform exercise for

enough time in order to be able to activate any

entertainment appliance. The activity level of

children is monitored using a Nike + iPod Sports

Kit, which is becoming more popular. It records the

number of steps taken and elapsed time. Therefore,

the application can calculate calories and other

related data from the records. A database is utilized

to store the exercise records and the time budget for

every registered child.

BIODEVICES 2010 - International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices

No Pain No game lowers the risk of being

cheated by means of its validation process. Also, its

user-friendly GUI allows children to easily learn

how to extend their entertainment time. Children can

obtain a sense of achievement, while parents can let

the system automatically monitor the activity level

of their children and the status of the appliances. It is

believed that a complete No Pain No Game product

would enable the parents to inexpensively supervise

their children's exercise and entertainment in a

completely unobtrusive fashion.

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A WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM FOR CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION