In a previous post from a few years ago, we mentioned that our findings on the Pose project established that there were perceivable differences between child and adult motion. Our next steps were to quantify what these differences actually were. As a first step to investigating these quantifiable characteristics, we concentrated on temporal and spatial features commonly utilized in the analysis of gait (i.e., walking and running) to analyze the walking (walk in place, walk in place as fast as you can) and running (run in place, run in place as fast as you can) actions in our Kinder-Gator dataset. Our paper presenting this analysis, titled “Quantifying Differences between Child and Adult Motion using Gait Features,” was accepted as an invited paper to HCII 2019: the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. The paper details our analysis of nine features with respect to age group (child vs. adult) and actions (walk, walk fast, run, and run fast) and the implications of our results with respect to the design of whole-body interaction prompts and improvement of recognizers for whole-body motions. Here is the abstract:

Previous work has shown that motion performed by children is perceivably different from that performed by adults. What exactly is being perceived has not been identified: what are the quantifiable differences between child and adult motion for different actions? In this paper, we used data captured with the Microsoft Kinect from 10 children (ages 5 to 9) and 10 adults performing four dynamic actions (walk in place, walk in place as fast as you can, run in place, run in place as fast as you can). We computed spatial and temporal features of these motions from gait analysis, and found that temporal features such as step time, cycle time, cycle frequency, and cadence are different in the motion of children compared to that of adults. Children moved faster and completed more steps in the same time as adults. We discuss implications of our results for improving whole-body interaction experiences for children.

Interested readers can find the camera-ready version (preprint) available here. The HCII 2019 conference will take place in Orlando, Florida from July 26 – July 31 during which I will be presenting the paper.

Working on this paper advanced my knowledge of the analysis of gait, and improved my understanding of human movement for both children and adults. I am looking forward to presenting the paper at the conference as the conference will provide an avenue to gain valuable feedback from the audience regarding the conclusions of the paper.