Crew exercise is important for maintaining health and fitness of astronauts, especially in preventing adverse health problems associated with long-duration space flight, such as losses in muscle strength and endurance, bone density, balance and aerobic capacity. The proposed ESPRIT system will support NASA's Exercise Countermeasure project for observing crew's exercise activities, performing motion capture and kinematic analysis, and will contribute towards the understanding the effect of microgravity in physical activities. ESPRIT is designed to satisfy the constraints in size, weight and power consumption imposed by the spacecraft environment. The system will be easy to set up and operated by the crew.
Non-NASA applications include uses in medicine and rehabilitation, such as gait analysis, orthopedics, and other applications for monitoring skeletal movement. Other applications include personal fitness and support of the aging, human-robotics and human-computer interaction, simulation, immersive reality, and video games. Potential customers include government research agencies such as Air Force Research Laboratory for human performance analysis and human factor engineering; National Institute of Health for rehabilitation research; physiotherapy clinics and nursing homes
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