GAINE - tanGible Augmented INteraction for Edutainment

Interactive tabletops are gaining an increasing interest since they provide a more natural interaction with digital contents and allow the interaction of multiple users at a time promoting face-to-face collaboration, information sharing and the raise of social experiences. Given the potentialities offered by these devices, several entertainment-edutainment applications based on interactive tabletops have been successfully developed in different areas, from medical therapy support to children’s collaborative learning, interactive storytelling and cultural heritage. However, the development of such applications often requires complex technical and implementation skills. Taking this into consideration, in this paper we present GAINE (tanGible Augmented INteraction for Edutainment), a software framework aimed at the rapid prototyping and development of interactive tabletop games. GAINE offers developers context specific high-level constructs and a simple scripting language that simplifies the implementation task. The framework is portable on different operating systems and offers independence from the underlying hardware. Two practical case studies are thoroughly discussed to show how GAINE can simplify the development of interactive tabletop applications in the entertainment and edutainment contexts

A systematic review of game technologies for pediatric patients

[EN] Children in hospital are subjected to multiple negative stimuli that may hinder their development and social interactions. Although game technologies are thought to improve children's experience in hospital, there is a lack of information on how they can be used effectively. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on the existing approaches in this context to identify gaps for future research. A total of 1305 studies were identified, of which 75 were thoroughly analyzed according to our review protocol. The results show that the most common approach is to design mono-user games with traditional computers or monitor-based video consoles, which serve as a distractor or a motivator for physical rehabilitation for primary school children undergoing fearful procedures such as venipuncture, or those suffering chronic, neurological, or traumatic diseases/injures. We conclude that, on the one hand, game technologies seem to present physical and psychological benefits to pediatric patients, but more research is needed on this. On the other hand, future designers of games for pediatric hospitalization should consider: 1. The development for kindergarten patients and adolescents, 2. Address the psychological impact caused by long-term hospitalization, 3. Use collaboration as an effective game strategy to reduce patient isolation, 4. Have purposes other than distraction, such as socialization, coping with emotions, or fostering physical mobility, 5. Include parents/caregivers and hospital staff in the game activities; and 6. Exploit new technological artifacts such as robots and tangible interactive elements to encourage intrinsic motivation.This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R.El Jurdi, S.; Montaner-Marco, J.; García Sanjuan, F.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Nácher-Soler, VE. (2018). A systematic review of game technologies for pediatric patients. Computers in Biology and Medicine. 97:89-112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2018.04.019S891129

GAINE - A Portable Framework for the Development of Edutainment Applications Based on Multitouch and Tangible Interaction

In the last few years, Multitouch and Tangible User Interfaces have emerged as a powerful tool to integrate interactive surfaces and responsive spaces that embody digital information. Besides providing a natural interaction with digital contents, they allow the interaction of multiple users at the same time, thus promoting collaborative activities and information sharing. In particular, these characteristics have opened new exploration possibilities in the edutainment context, as witnessed by the many applications successfully developed in different areas, from children’s collaborative learning to interactive storytelling, cultural heritage and medical therapy support. However, due to the availability of different multitouch and tangible interaction technologies and of different target computing platforms, the development and deployment of such applications can be challenging. To this end, in this paper we present GAINE (tanGible Augmented INteraction for Edutainment), a software framework that enables rapid prototyping and development of tangible augmented applications for edutainment purposes. GAINE has two main features. First, it offers developers high-level context specific constructs that significantly reduces the implementation burden. Second, the framework is portable on different operating systems and offers independence from the underlying hardware and tracking technology. In this paper, we also discuss several case studies to show the effectiveness of GAINE in simplifying the development of entertainment and edutainment applications based on multitouch and tangible interaction

Toward emotional interactive videogames for children with autism spectrum disorder

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure children’s attention, concentration and satisfaction, while the second uses tangible tabletops for fostering cognitive planning. The analysis of the results obtained allows to propose a new study integrating both, in which the tangible interactive game is complemented with the emotional trainer in a way that allows identifying and classifying children’s emotion with ASD when they collaborate to solve cognitively significant and contextualized challenges. The first application proposed is an emotional trainer application in which the child can work out the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise and neutral). Further, a serious videogame is proposed: a 3D maze where the emotions can be captured. The second case study was carried out in a Special Education Center, where a set of activities for working cognitive planning was proposed. In this case, a tangible interactive tabletop was used to analyze, in students with ASD, how the communication processes with these interfaces affect to the attention, memory, successive and simultaneous processing that compose cognitive planning from the PASS model. The results of the first study, suggest that the autistic children did not act with previous planning, but they used their perception to adjust their actions a posteriori (that explains the higher number of collisions). On the second case study, the successive processing was not explored. The inclusion of the mazes of case study 1 to a semantic rich scenario could allow us to measure the prior planning and the emotions involved in the maze game. The new physiological sensors will also help to validate the emotions felt by the children. The first study has as objective the capability to imitate emotions and resolve a maze without semantic context. The second study organized all the actions from a semantic context close to users. The attention results presented by the second study are coherent with the first study and complement it showing that attention can be receptive or selective. In the first study case, the receptive attention was the focus of analysis. In the second case, both contributed to explain and understand how it can be developed from a videogame

Development Of a Wearable for Remote Health Monitoring in Infants

The extremely undesired occurrence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) begins with an infant who is put without constant check, although most of the infants are apparently healthy. The need to circumvent such occurrences demands at least keeping a constant check on the child’s vital physiological changes by all means, most importantly remotely. When a child is going through distress the most likely change observed instantly is their heart rate and temperature. The device designed and built in this work would help keep check on the body temperature as well as heart rate. This health monitoring device would get signals from the wearable worn by the child whenever there is a change in temperature and heart rate, and send the vital parameters to the guardians wirelessly. With this kind of device in place, presented simply in form of a wearable, the growing rate of infant mortality due to lack of care givers and close attention or any form of negligence would be curbed

Assessment and development of cognitive skills using tangible electronic board games : serious games on the TUI TagTiles

When designing the educational tools and methods of the future, putting the child and its natural way of developing at the center offers great benefits. The child will be more motivated and at the same time the educational yield will be higher and more targeted. In this dissertation it is shown that electronic tangible systems like the TagTiles console can offer integral, personalized development of children in the areas of cognitive, fine motor and social skills for assessment, education and therapy, in a manner that builds on natural forms of play of children. Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are potentially highly effective tools for education combining physical interfaces with computing power, enabling easy-to-use and robust applications that are enjoyable and motivating. The topic of this dissertation is whether and how TUIs can be developed that are effective for developing cognitive skills of children. Classical theories on cognitive development were used as a theoretical foundation for the development of a TUI-based educational application, such as the role of sensorimotor abilities for cognitive development as described by Piaget. Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development was used to inspire the implementation of adaptivity in the educational application. The research described consisted of three phases, each including an empirical study conducted at primary schools. In the first phase the influence of the type of interface on the performance of children on an educational task was investigated. The use of a virtual, pc-based interface was compared to the use of a tangible, non-electronic interface for the same puzzle task. It was found that children (N=26, aged 5-7 years) were able to solve the tangible puzzle tasks on average almost twice as fast as the PC based task, and needed considerably less instruction for the tangible version. The results of the study support the hypothesis that tangible interfaces offer a more suitable interface than a pc-based interface to educational tasks, at least for young children. In the second phase it was validated whether a range of TUI-based tasks can be used to address nonverbal, cognitive skills. The applied tasks had been developed for use with ‘TagTiles’. TagTiles is a tabletop electronic console with tangible game pieces developed by Serious Toys B.V. (www.serioustoys.com). The console includes a sensing board with an array of LED lights underneath and audio output. The system is controlled by manipulating game pieces on the TagTiles surface. Eight visual-spatial tasks were created, intended to address different nonverbal cognitive skills such as (working) memory and spatial reasoning. Each task included abstract patterns consisting of colored tiles. For each task a different assignment is given to the player, such as mirroring the pattern, or repeating a sequence of tiles that lit up on the board. To validate which skills can be addressed with these tasks, children’s performances on the TagTiles tasks were correlated with performances on several conventional psychometric instruments. This study included children aged 8-10 years and consisted of a pilot study (N=10) and an experiment (N=32). Significant correlations were found between the performances of children on the TagTiles tasks and the performances on nonverbal subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children IIINL (WISC IIINL). Some tasks also showed significant correlations with Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which is an intelligence test measuring deductive reasoning skills. The results of this study indicate that the developed tasks can be used to train skills that are measured in IQ tests. In the third phase it was investigated whether the developed visual-spatial tasks kept their ability to address cognitive skills when embedded in a game. It was also tested whether children experienced this game, called ‘Tap the little hedgehog’, to be fun and intrinsically motivating. A fantasy theme was added to include the tasks in a natural way, to minimize and simplify the instructions needed to understand the game play and to make the tasks more fun to play. The difficulty of the task levels was made adaptive to the player’s achievements. A reward structure was added to increase children’s motivation to reach certain goals in the game as well as a support structure, created to help the child when needed, enabling independent play. The results of the empirical study (N=52, aged 7-9 years) with this game indicated that the added game context had not changed the essence of the tasks, as the performances were similar to those in the study in phase two. These findings support the hypothesis that TagTiles tasks applied in a game context can be used to assess and train a range of nonverbal skills. For assessment purposes we concluded that TagTiles can be used to test at least part of the cognitive skills that are addressed with the applied conventional psychological measures, given the significant correlations that were found. Studies by others have shown that training of relevant skills such as working memory can improve aspects of intellectual functioning, in particular executive functioning and efficient use of working memory. This opens the exciting prospect that by practicing with TagTiles the performance on the mentioned skills may be enhanced, or that these skills may be more effectively used. This means that it would be useful to investigate whether, after further refinement and validation, the TagTiles tasks can be used for assessment and training of specific cognitive skills. Based on the results of the conducted studies, it was concluded that the integral and personalized development of children in the areas of cognitive, fine motor and social skills for assessment, education and therapy can be facilitated with TUIs like TagTiles. Educational TUIs can profoundly change current education and assessment practices, offering an alternative that is enjoyable to the child and effective and accurate to the educational or assessment expert. The described way of creating a challenge using the Zone of Proximal Development can also be used to improve the experience with educational games

Shortages and challenges in augmentative communication through tangible interaction using a user-centered design and assessment process

In this article, we present an assessment process on a tangible interaction application oriented to individuals with complex communication needs, called ACoTI, and details about the main results obtained thus far. The process is based on a set of decisions that have been surveyed as key elements for assessing this type of experiences, based on a background review that was carried out. In addition to that, it has taken into account the contribution of key players from the special education field and it is the foundation for the user-centered and evolutionary design of the application. A number of findings and challenges that open up the door to keep contributing to this specific area was presented. For instance, creating an authoring tool that is available for the educators to be able to generate themselves customized activities for their students, considering the specific needs of each of them

Shortages and Challenges in Augmentative Communication through Tangible Interaction Using a User-centered Design and Assessment Process

In this article, we present an assessment process on a tangible interaction application oriented to individuals with complex communication needs, called ACoTI, and details about the main results obtained thus far. The process is based on a set of decisions that have been surveyed as key elements for assessing this type of experiences, based on a background review that was carried out. In addition to that, it has taken into account the contribution of key players from the special education field and it is the foundation for the user-centered and evolutionary design of the application. A number of findings and challenges that open up the door to keep contributing to this specific area was presented. For instance, creating an authoring tool that is available for the educators to be able to generate themselves customized activities for their students, considering the specific needs of each of them.Instituto de Investigación en Informátic