Abstract
We propose a privacy protective avatar mediated distant-care system. The system avateers an elderly person and animates the avatar representation based on their articular angles acquired by a motion capture system. The design of our distant-care system allows us to achieve privacy protected information delivery of the elderly person's bodily movements. We implemented the system in a form of web application with an inexpensive motion-capture device and evaluated the system's communication performance. As the result, we confirmed that the system could draw fluid animation without delay under the condition of 700Kbps network bandwidth. Also, we conducted user study in which we evaluated user comprehension of the avatar movements and user paerception of the elderly person represented by the avatar. As the results, we found that the users could understand broad movements of the avatar and answered the elderly person represented by the avatar with inexpensive motion-capature device was as likable as the elderly person when used high-precesion motion-capture device.
