Serious Motion-sensing Rehab Games

If your research benefits from the EEA Grants results, please cite the relevant papers in any publications about your work:

[1] A. Lekova, V. Stancheva, A. Krastev, M. Dimitrova, H.Wagatsuma. Redesign of Computer Games towards Serious Motion-Sensing Games for Children with Limited Physical Skills: A Developer Perspective, Springer ICT Innovations 2015 conference for Emerging Technologies for Better Living, October Ohrid, 2015 (in print)

[2] Botsova, R., A. Lekova, I. Chavdarov “Imitation learning of robots by integrating Microsoft Kinect and PID Controller with a sensor for angular displacement in a robot joint”, ACM Intern. Conf. on Computer Systems and Technologies, Compsystech’15, June, Dublin, Ireland, 2015 (in print)

Redesign of Computer Games towards Serious Motion-Sensing Games for Children with Limited Physical Skills: A Developer Perspective

Educators and psychologists have long established that the play has a leading priority in the child’s education and have developed many models, revealing the link between the physical and social development of the child. The overall aim of this research is how to ensure the children with developmental problems or disabilities the possibility to play, on the one hand for the sake of the play itself (unstructured play) and on the other – for the sake of the play as a function for improvement of the motor skills of these children (structured play).

What is a Serious Game?

A serious game is a game designed for a specific purpose, rather than for pure entertainment. When it serves as a rehabilitative therapy, we call it a serious rehabgame. Rehabgaming (a blend of "rehabilitation" and "gaming") is a term defined by us for any digital structured play that combines entertainment and rehabilitative activities.

What is a Rehabgaming?

Rehabgaming (a blend of "rehabilitation" and "gaming") is a term defined by us for any digital structured play that combines entertainment and rehabilitative activities

What is Kinectifing?

Changing the programme interface from mouse and keyboard controllers to hand gestures by replacing the mouse or keyboard events with Kinect events for processing raw depth data and skeleton joints.

Why to Kinectify?

By kinectifying digital games we enhance the children motivation to repeat controlled movements. For instance, in solving a puzzle with gestures on the screen a child repeats and repeats the same movements until reaching the goal.

Evaluation

The play is testing by User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ)

and our own developed Questinarie (comming soon)

The paper was Submitted to

Special topic of the ICT Innovations 2015 conference: Emerging Technologies for Better Living

and was presented in Ohrid on the 1st of October 2015

Experiments

Gesture Imitation using Kinect Skeleton data

http://rehabgaming.aabg.eu/images/ImitationGestExtend.wmv

http://rehabgaming.aabg.eu/images/ImitationGestExtendCorrected.wmv

Control Panel

The rehabgame was testing as well by a child-psychiatrist, a speech therapist and a kinesis therapist forming our control panel of experts (CP). Thus we obtained a feedback in a form of interview what strengths, weaknesses, and challenges exist from a technical point of view and how well the kinesthetics of rehabilitation is transferred to the context of Kinect motion-sensing.

http://rehabgaming.aabg.eu/images/expertP2.avi