A Design of Hand Gestures for Softening Finger Base in Exergame System for Tenosynovitis Prevention

With an increasing number of people who have been addicted to use of cellular phones, smartphone tenosynovitis has become common due to long-term use of fingers for operations. To avoid it, hand and finger exercises are effective. To make them interesting and included in daily schedules, exergame can be a good solution to provide joyful exercise opportunities while playing video games. Previously, we have proposed and implemented a exergame system for tenosynovitis prevention using a hand gesture recognition program made in Python with Mediapipe library. For this system, we designed hand gestures for softening the wrist of a hand. By measuring the angles for the maximum wrist movements in our experiments, we confirmed that the wrist flexibility was improved by using this system. In this paper, we design and implement hand gestures using a rubber band for softening finger bases in the exergame system. As proper ones, we adopt four video games made by JavaScript or Python. For preliminary evaluations, we asked two students in Okayama University, Japan, to play the games, and measure the maximum angle for the thumb movement. The results confirmed the finger flexibility improvements by using the proposal.