Unobtrusively Regulating Children’s Posture via Slow Visual Stimuli on Tablets

Children’s retention of a proper body posture while interacting with educational tablet applications is important for both their physical health and task performance. In this work, we propose a new approach to unobtrusively induce postural changes in children by applying a slowly deforming visual stimulus appearing on the tablet screen. To preliminarily validate our approach we designed a reading-and-writing tablet application for children, during which 8 different slow visual stimuli would be provided, and monitored the children’s posture via a vision-based automated posture tracking system. Results from 10 children aged 6-11 suggest that the proposed approach is suitable for unobtrusively changing children’s postures and will stand as the basis for the future design of an adaptive unobtrusive posture regulation system.