{"id":2494,"date":"2013-09-18T09:53:18","date_gmt":"2013-09-18T17:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2494"},"modified":"2013-09-18T09:53:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-18T17:53:18","slug":"dana-blogs-math-warrior-for-the-blind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2494","title":{"rendered":"dana blogs math: Warrior for the Blind"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"Warrior 2" is an example of a yoga pose that blind people can now learn with Kyle Rector's yoga game. Model: Katie Thomas. Photographer: Karlie Sherman Photography. Used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

Why should sighted people have all the fun? Kyle Rector<\/a>, one of the young participants in this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum, doesn’t think they should.<\/p>\n

As part of her dissertation research <\/a>on \u201ceyes-free technology\u201d at the University of Washington, with professors Julie Kientz<\/a> and Richard Ladner<\/a>, Rector has written a computer program that enables blind people to learn yoga from a computer. A Microsoft Kinect “watches” the movements of a blind yoga student performing, say, a Warrior 2 pose. If the student makes a mistake, the computer program provides verbal corrections. If she does the pose right, the computer tells her that, too.<\/p>\n

Rector\u2019s project is a perfect convergence of three of her biggest interests: exercise, disabilities, and computer science. She loves exercising: she rides a bike, she has run a marathon (although it caused her to injure her knee), and yes, she does yoga. \u201cI\u2019m not a yoga instructor, though,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She also has a cousin who is nearly deaf, so she grew up very aware of the challenges faced by people with disabilities. \u201cWhen I came to visit UW as a potential graduate school, I was excited to find out that Richard Ladner, one of my advisors, does research on accessibility,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Finally, Rector\u2019s interest in computer science is, of course, the passion that has brought her to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. The event will give her a chance to network with people whom she would otherwise have known only as a name in a textbook. \u201cI still can\u2019t believe that I\u2019m going to be around that many Turing Award winners and Abel Prize winners,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s still a shock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curiously, Rector\u2019s career in computer science almost didn\u2019t happen. If it hadn\u2019t been for her mother\u2019s sharp eyes, as well as the patient mentoring of her undergraduate advisor, she might have chosen a different path.<\/p>\n

About ten years ago, when Rector was 17, her mother brought home some information about a summer program at MIT called the Women in Technology program. Rector thought she had no chance of getting accepted, so she threw the application into the recycling bin. \u201cMy mom found it there, fished it out and said, \u2018You\u2019re going to apply,\u2019\u201d Rector says. \u201cSo I applied and got in. I couldn\u2019t believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the month-long program at MIT, she took courses in math, electrical engineering and computer science. \u201cI actually despised computer science the first time around,\u201d she says. The reason was that most of her fellow campers already knew how to program computers, and she didn\u2019t. \u201cWhen you have these people writing circles around you, you feel as if you\u2019re stupid,\u201d she says. So when she went to college at Oregon State University, she had every intention of majoring in electrical engineering, not computer science.<\/p>\n

But at Oregon State she met Margaret Burnett<\/a>, a computer science professor who specializes in human-computer interaction and who also has a strong interest in the connection between gender and technology. Burnett was her adviser for a project on the differences between the ways that males and females use Microsoft Excel. Gradually Rector began to warm up to computer science.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took her two years to persuade me to add a computer science major,\u201d she says. \u201cI finally realized that if I like the research, and the classes are getting more enjoyable, and now I\u2019m starting to love the programming, then I probably just like computer science. I also saw that there was a bigger meaning to computer science. All of these struggles were worth something because you\u2019re actually building something useful that matters to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far the yoga game is the most ambitious \u201csomething that matters\u201d that she has built. It\u2019s still a work in progress. Most notably, the game doesn\u2019t actually have a \u201cstart\u201d command yet, because she has been too busy getting the core of the program to work. But what she\u2019s already accomplished in a short time (from the fall of 2012 to the spring of 2013) is quite impressive.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the simplest part is teaching the computer to recognize when a student isn\u2019t doing a pose right. As it turns out, this part is very mathematical; in fact, it\u2019s high-school geometry. Consider a typical pose, such as the Warrior 2 pose. You are supposed to extend your arms straight out to the sides, pivot one foot by 90 degrees and the other by 45 degrees, and bend one knee so that it forms a right angle, with the knee directly above the ankle. All of these concepts have to do with angles.<\/p>\n

The Kinect has two cameras that can identify the spatial coordinates of each one of 20 joints in the human body. Rector\u2019s program then calculates the angles at each joint, using the law of cosines. In the Warrior 2 pose, for example, the arms are supposed to form a right angle with the torso. If the Kinect sees them forming an angle of less than 80 degrees or greater than 100 degrees, then Rector\u2019s software will alert the student to raise or lower her arms until the angle falls within the targeted range.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the mathematics was the easy part. The next step was teaching the computer how to explain what a student was doing wrong. She asked five yoga instructors for tips on how they communicated with students, and experimented with different wording. \u201cI learned that metaphors were really helpful,\u201d she says. \u201cFor example, I tell the students to stretch their arms to the side like a tightrope walker, or keep their feet parallel as if they were on skis.\u201d Sometimes she was surprised by what worked and what didn\u2019t. With blind people, telling them to reach toward the sky was not very effective. They weren\u2019t used to thinking that way. But telling them to reach up as if they were getting something off of a high shelf\u2014that immediately clicked.<\/p>\n

After programming in the verbal instructions, she tested the yoga game herself, deliberately making every possible mistake. This turned out to be a not entirely smart thing to do, because she aggravated her sore knee in the process. But it did give her the confidence to test the program on other volunteers, only three months after she began the project. \u201cBy the time they tried it, it was safe,\u201d she reassures me.<\/p>\n

There was one more problem: Who would try it? \u201cIt\u2019s not so easy to find people who have low vision, who are able to commute to where you are, and who are also interested in performing yoga for maybe the first time,\u201d she says. She finally lined up 16 volunteers, for which she had to travel around the state of Washington. \u201cIt was exhausting, because each study took an hour, and there was one day when I ran seven participants,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But the results were very gratifying. Thirteen of the 16 students liked the \u201cexergame\u201d and many of them wanted to know when they could buy it! That surprised Rector, who (just for the record) has no plans yet to make the yoga game a commercial project. She will, in all likelihood, make the yoga program available for free to the volunteers and to the yoga instructors who helped her out, once it is stable and user-friendly enough. She\u2019s not interested in selling it because software products for blind people tend to be very expensive, and she doesn\u2019t want to add to their financial burden.<\/p>\n

I have a hunch, though. If she really wanted to make money\u2014which she clearly doesn\u2019t\u2014there\u2019s another clientele that might find her product useful: yoga students with normal<\/em> eyesight. After all, how are you supposed to know if you\u2019re doing the poses right when you\u2019re practicing at home, far from the instructor’s benevolent gaze?<\/p>\n

For the time being, Rector is more interested in living the life of an academic than that of an entrepreneur: traveling to conferences, collaborating with and learning from interesting people. This spring she went to conferences in Paris and San Francisco. She spent the summer doing a research internship at HP Labs in Palo Alto. After the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, her whirlwind schedule will continue with a trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Minneapolis, where she will present her yoga research. Clearly, for this long-distance runner and long-distance traveler, slowing down is not an option!<\/p>\n

Click below to watch Kyle Rector’s YouTube video demonstrating the yoga “exergame.”<\/p>\n