HeartBeat: An Outdoor Pervasive Game for Children

by

Remco Magielse
Panos Markopoulous
Eindhoven University of Technology

Heartbeat is an experiment into how sensing the heart rate of children could promote outdoor activity, specifically outdoor augmented reality games called "pervasive games".  Pervasive games are games that use technology such as wifi or gps to augment reality such as the game Human Pacman.

Unfortunately, games like this require the user to be "head down" which mean facing down to look at the technological device which can lead to decreased engagement with others.  This is not preferable for the development of children and not a perfect solution to the rise of video game consoles, which restrain the children to be in a single room.

Heartbeat is considered a "heads up" game that requires little visual attention from children and allows them to interact more with their environment and peers.

The game is a variation of capture the flag with two teams: the attackers and defenders.  Children hide at the beginning of the game and then all hand held devices are broadcast with a randomized role distribution.  Each of the attackers try to tag the defending team's device to transfer them over to the attacking team.  One defender is given a special treasure to protect during the game.

The game was played at a local park and in a local forest near the school the kids were from. Games were limited to 4 minutes. If the defending team did not get caught during that time then they won.

The actual prototype for the game was a device strapped around the chest to measure heart rate. When the players heart rate passed the threshold heart rate(in this case 100bpm) the player's device would beep at a rate consistent with the player's heart rate alerting others to their presence.  They ran two different trials, one with where the team member's hardware would beep every 1.5 seconds and one where the team member's hardware would beep in sync with their heartbeat.

Overall it seemed that children did not show any significant difference in physical activity. They stated that there was no substantial increase in physical activity with or with out the heart beat sensor. Also, the children had mixed reviews on whether or not they appreciated the beeping sound aspect of the game.

Paper

Discussion:
I feel like the game was not designed well to incorporate heart rate sensing into the design.  To be honest, it seemed like the aspects that the authors said went well about the experiment seemed to be aspects of a normal outdoor game and not about the augmented aspect of the pervasive game.