Development and Validation of a System for Game Control Based on a Force Plate

Abstract

A force plate is a device that measures the ground reaction force caused by a shift in the human body’s center of mass (CoM). Using a controlled change in the human body’s CoM, the human body’s center of pressure (CoP) is shifted in a 2D plane, along with an acceleration of the CoM along the plane perpendicular to the force plate, which allows for a generation of reference values for game control. In this paper, the development and validation of a system for game control based on a force plate are described. The game control system consists of a force plate, an electronic board used for measuring and PC communication via USB, and a PC application for data acquisition, system calibration, and game control. Based on the measured values of the player’s CoP and the CoM acceleration along a plane perpendicular to the force plate, the game control system simulates pressing the UP, DOWN, RIGHT, LEFT, and SPACE keyboard keys or moving the mouse and clicking the left mouse button, which allows players to control simple games. A mathematical model has been developed for the game control system which includes running system calibration procedures in the system for each individual player. The mechatronic game control system is described in detail, and experiments were run on said system for the purpose of system validation.