Gamified platfom for physical and cognitive rehabilitation for children

GAMIFIED PLATFORM FOR PHYSICAL AND COGNITIVE REHABILITATIONCARINA GONZÁLEZ*, PEDRO TOLEDO*, ALBERTO MORA**, YERAY BARRIOS* *UNIVERSIDAD DE LA LAGUNA **UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA

GALACONF: HEALTH WORKSHOP ROME, WEDNESDAY, 9TH DECEMBER, 2015

GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15

ROUTEMAP

▸ Introduction

▸ Background

▸ Tango:H

▸ Technology

▸ Validation

▸ Conclusions


INTRODUCTION

▸ Nowadays, hospital schools provide educational services to hospitalized children during the period of compulsory education

▸ Social, physical and cognitive issues are essential needs of hospitalized children

▸ Short term (up to 5 days), medium-term (6-20 days) and long term (over 21 days) hospitalization seasons affect differently in the process of socialization and education


INTRODUCTION

▸ Oncological, orthopedic, respiratory, diabetes and surgery are the most common affectations (not strict bed rest)

▸ Teachers from hospital schools encourage development of children, avoiding marginalization, offsetting the effects of the disease, reducing stress and facilitating learning

▸ There is a lack of customizable IT tools for professionals of hospital schools and, in addition to the achievement of high motivation


BACKGROUND

▸ Collaboration and discussion with health professionals concludes the need of tools to enhance and strengthen the physical and motor skills of the hospitalized children

▸ Non-invasive systems, that pose no greater attachment to children, are required

▸ An average of 210 children a year are treated in Tenerife (Spain) hospital schools


TANGO:H PLATFORM (DESCRIPTION)

▸ TANGO:H (Tangible Goals: Health) arises as an open platform accessible and highly configurable to enable the creation, customization and adaptation of exercises and activities

▸ A platform based on the principles of gamification in order to maximize motivation and satisfaction children during execution

▸ A platform suitable for hospitalized children in order to work their physical, cognitive and social status during hospitalized season

▸ A non-invasive platform which allows interaction through body and gestures (based on MS Kinect)


TANGO:H PLATFORM (FEATURES)

▸ It provides a simple interface which guides the setting up and execution of exercises, allowing:

▸ Selection and creation of user and groups

▸ Selection or importing exercises

▸ Assignation of single or multiuser modes and types

▸ Storage and retrieval information about exercises

▸ Guided by a recommender system or freely


TANGO:H PLATFORM (FEATURES)

▸ Recommender system

▸ Skills (more suitable exercises)

▸ Levels (avoiding inefficiency and lack of motivation)

▸ Beginner: basic exercises (on-boarding)

▸ Intermediate: challenging exercises (enhancement)

▸ Expert: high difficulty (mastery)

▸ Timing


TANGO:H PLATFORM (KICK OFF)

▸ Easy and fast setting up:

▸ Users selection

▸ Exercise selection

▸ Enabling mode

▸ Sensor recognition

▸ Starting


TANGO:H PLATFORM (KICK OFF)


TANGO:H DESIGNER (FEATURES)

▸ A dynamic environment for the development of exercises (backend)

▸ Easy and intuitive design interface for professionals

▸ Translated into several languages (.csv file supported)

▸ Three kinds of exercises:

▸ Physics: mobility promotion

▸ Cognitives: cognitive stimulation (matching, ordering or classifying)

▸ Free: total freedom design


TANGO:H DESIGNER (FEATURES)

▸ Cognitive: Matching, ordering & classifying


TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)

▸ Body contact points

▸ It allows user interaction with objectives definition (assignment)

▸ Currently 13 contact points enabled for the Kinect sensor



▸ Objectives

▸ Achievable elements for one or more contact points

▸ Components:

▸ Picture (customizable)

▸ Sound (success/fail)

▸ Border color (related with the colored contact points)



▸ How to achieve objectives with contact points?

▸ Simultaneous (i.e. two hands), single (i.e. one hand) or distractor (no interaction needed)



▸ Phases

▸ Groups of targets (objectives at the same screen)

▸ The achievement of all objectives is necessary to overcome a phase

▸ Synchronous (all objectives simultaneously) and asynchronous (regardless the order and time)

▸ Screen part equivalence



▸ Sync & Async



▸ Steps

▸ Groups of phases

▸ The achievement of all phases is necessary to overcome a step

▸ Sequential (overcome by the order in which they were created and) random (regardless the order)

▸ Screen equivalence



▸ Sequential & random


TANGO:H DESIGNER (STRUCTURE)

▸ Exercise 1

▸ Step 1

▸ Phase 1

▸ Objective 1

▸ Contact points

▸ Objective n

▸ Phase n

▸ Step n


TANGO:H DESIGNER (MODES)

▸ Single: conducted by one player

▸ Multiplayer (2 users MS Kinect v1 < 6 users v2):

▸ Sequentially: one after the other

▸ Simultaneously: bodies “together”

▸ Competitive: single objectives and achievements

▸ Collaborative: common objectives and achievements


TANGO:H DESIGNER (CUSTOMIZATION)

▸ Recommender system

▸ Skills, based on the exercises requirements and user skills: speed, balance, coordination and reflexes

▸ Level adjustment (Hutzler et al., 2007), based on the user achievements

▸ Timing step and objective

▸ Free customization


TANGO:H DESIGNER (REPORTING)

▸ Single and collective statistics (skills, levels, points, attempts, succeed and fail track, time, emotion, etc.)


TANGO:H DESIGNER (INTERFACE)


GAMIFICATION

▸ Gamification conceived as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. (Deterding et al., 2011)

▸ Why gamify?

▸ For the achievement of children engagement

▸ They are not usually motivated to assist hospital school and carry out the activities

▸ Entertainment is not the main objective


GAMIFICATION

▸ Mechanics supported

▸ Starts (quality performance): time, success, fails, etc.

▸ Levels (crowns of kings)

▸ Player skills

▸ Leaderboards

▸ Badges (prizes)

▸ Virtual economy (starts and prizes)

▸ Dynamics: collaborative and competitive challenges…


TECHNOLOGY

▸ Desktop version (Tango:H platform and designer)

▸ Windows OS

▸ C# language, on the .NET platform

▸ PrimeSense drivers and OpenNI libraries (allow the development of applications for the MS Kinect device) v1 -> MS Kinect SDK2 v2

▸ XML format for exercises definition

▸ Supports Kinect sensor v1 & v2


TECHNOLOGY

▸ Web version (Tango:H designer)

▸ HTML5 / CSS3

▸ Javascript/JQuery

▸ PHP

▸ XML format for exercise definition

▸ Supports exercise design for Kinect sensor v1, v2


VALIDATION

▸ User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology was used for the development (Nicholson, 2012)

▸ Playability, usability and functionality validation with experts and children (González, 2012)

▸ Health pilots (some examples)

▸ Hospital Universitario de Canarias (Spain)

▸ Asociación Down Tenerife (Spain)

▸ Instituto Heller (Ecuador)

▸ etc.


CONCLUSIONS

▸ An interactive platform, called TANGO:H has been described (KINECT-based)

▸ An adaptable system to diverse health scopes: from hospitalized children to home care (physical and cognitive)

▸ A highly configurable and customizable tool thanks the editor available (TANGO:H designer) within a recommender system

▸ A validated system (tested in different health locations)

▸ A extensible platform for other environments


CURRENT & FURTHER WORK

▸ Supporting pilot study: PROVITAO project (active program for the obesity ambulatory treatment)

▸ Supporting students with SEN (i.e. Down syndrome)

▸ Exploiting Kinect v2 sensor possibilities (emotion analysis)

▸ Upgrading the recommender system

▸ Improving and personalizing the gamified experience

DETERDING, S., DIXON, D., KHALED, R., & NACKE, L. (2011, SEPTEMBER). FROM GAME DESIGN ELEMENTS TO GAMEFULNESS: DEFINING GAMIFICATION. IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC MINDTREK CONFERENCE: ENVISIONING FUTURE MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS (PP. 9-15). ACM.

HUTZLER, Y AND SHERRIL, C (2007). DEFINING ADAPTED PHYSICAL ACTIVITY: INTERNACIONAL PERSPECTIVES. ADAPTED PHYSICAL ACTIVITY QUARTERLY, 24 (1), 1-20.

NICHOLSON S. (2012). A USER-CENTERED THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR MEANINGFUL GAMIFICATION. PROCEEDINGS GLS 8.0.

GONZÁLEZ, C. (2012). STUDENT USABILITY IN EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE AND GAMES: IMPROVING EXPERIENCES. ADVANCES IN GAME-BASED LEARNING (AGBL) BOOK SERIES. IGI GLOBAL

Bibliography


THIS WORK IS FUNDED BY THE RESEARCH PROJECT SALUD-IN: “INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL REHABILITATION PLATFORM BASED ON SOCIAL GAMES FOR HEALTH, PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATURAL INTERACTION TECHNIQUES" PI2010/218 OF CANARIAN AGENCY FOR RESEARCH, INNOVATION AND INFORMATION SOCIETY

Acknowledgements


THANK YOU… QUESTIONS?

Alberto Mora [email protected] @amoracarreno