Our team experienced drastic changes this week as we changed our project theme completely from hospital setting in to the traditional Chinese Taiji posture detection and instructor. After the discussion with course staff in the past few days, we recognized some usability and cost issues not apparent to us initially. Such discrepancies cost us substantial time and effort to justify our work. Thus, by the end of the week, we decided to switch gears and move on to the current topic–Taiji Pose Recognition Project: Taichine.
We adopted the idea of Taiji instructor since it is not a major change from our original idea. Most hardware and software usage will stay the same, but the overall setting of Taiji is much more manageable regarding a semester-long project. We still plan to use the camera-RasPi-backend setup as before, but the hardware will have enough capabilities to detect, classify, and evaluate body posture in real-time since Taiji pose recognition has higher tolerance in recognition efficiency. There will also be more online resources available to us while fewer privacy concerns should arise. We will spend less time monitoring personal data and focus on certain actions/routines so that we can offer clear evaluations in short periods of time.
It has been a week of transitions and chaos, but we successfully identified valuable online resources on Taiji postures and its recognition, which we could apply as training sets into our OpenPose algorithm. For the next week, we will focus on fixiating our hardware/software quantifications and formulate an optimal design for our system. If time allows, we plan to start data collection for our machine learning process. We will make necessary changes to our schedule and make sure we do not fall behind in the upcoming weeks, when working on Design review and training our models.