Modeling Psychomotor Activity: Current Approaches and Open Issues

This paper presents current approaches and open issues regarding the modeling of users' physical activity when learning motor skills, such as those required to dance, play a musical instrument, practice sports or train in martial arts. On the one hand, it reveals the lack of personalized psychomotor learning systems and how the modeling of users' physical activity is just now becoming part of UMAP (User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization) community research agenda. On the other hand, it proposes the Labanotation as a way for describing the movements performed during the users' physical activity, and comments on related works which show that it seems to be feasible to perform this labeling automatically with machine learning techniques. To touch down the proposal, the applicability of Labanotation for modeling the psychomotor activity when learning defensive martial arts movements such as those performed jointly in pairs in Aikido is analyzed.