3-D streaming supplying partner protocols for mobile collaborative exergaming for health.

Childhood obesity is nowadays considered as one of the major health problems that many societies suffer from. The obesity epidemic leads to several life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and mental health problems like depression, anxiety and loneliness just to mention a few. Several approaches, including physical exercises, strict dietary, and exergames among others, have been adopted to address the obesity epidemic. Exergames are considered the innovative approach for fighting several health problem such as the obesity, where a combination of exercise and 3D gaming are proposed to incite kids to exercise as a team. Collaborative exergaming became even more popular given that it addresses the social side of the obesity epidemic, and it motivates kids to socialize with other kids. Traditional exergames are based on the client server approach where the server is responsible for streaming the 3D environment. However, this can lead to latency and server bottleneck if many clients participate in the exergame, which leads to the kids stopping exercising. Having an exergame application that does not suffer from networking problem such as delay, is very important given that it increases the exercise hours. In this work, we propose a new trend of mobile collaborative exergming applications that is based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, as well as two supplying partner selection protocols that aim at selecting the suitable source responsible for streaming the relevant 3D data. Our system, that we refer to as MOSAIC, is intended for mobile collaborative exergames that incite kids to move inside a large area, using thin mobile devices such as head mounted devices (HMD), have physical exercises, and collaborate with other kids which in consequence address several health problems such as the obesity epidemic on the physical and social plans. Our proposed mobile collaborative exergame aims at inciting the kids to exercise as a team for a longer time by improving the quality of the streaming and reducing the delay. This is accomplished by our proposed supplying partner selection protocols that provide a quick discovery of multiple supplying partners, by minimizing the time required the to acquire data. The performance evaluation we have obtained to evaluate our suite of protocols using a realistic set of exergame scenarios for obese kids is then presented and discussed.