Safety and Feasibility of a First-Person View, Full-Body Interaction Game for Telerehabilitation Post-Stroke

This study explored the feasibility and safety of pairing the Microsoft Kinect® sensor with the Oculus Rift® Head Mounted Display (HMD) as a telerehabilitation technology platform for persons post-stroke. To test initial safety, fourteen participants without disabilities (age 30 ± 8.8 years) engaged in a game-based task using the Microsoft Kinect® with a first-person view using the Oculus Rift®. These tasks were repeated for five participants post-stroke (age 56 ± 3.0 years). No significant adverse events occurred in either study population. When using the Oculus Rift® HMD, three participants without disabilities reported dizziness and nausea. All of the participants post-stroke required hands-on assistance for balance and fall prevention. The intensive nature of physical support necessary for this type of interaction limits the application as a telerehabilitation intervention.  Given the increasing availability of HMDs for commercial use, it is crucial that the safety of immersive games and technologies for telerehabilitation is fully explored

Virtual worlds for education: methodology, interaction and evaluation

2011 - 2012When students arrive in the classroom they expect to be involved in immersive, fun and challenging learning experiences. There is a high risk that they become quickly bored by the traditional instructional methods. The technological evolution offers a great variety of sophisticated interactive devices and applications that can be combined with innovative learning approaches to enhance study efficiency during the learning process. 3D immersive multi-user Virtual Worlds (VWs) are increasingly becoming popular and accessible to wide public due to the advances in computational power graphics and network bandwidth also connected with reduced costs. As a consequence, it is possible to offer more engaging user experiences. This is particularly true in the learning sector, where an increasing interest is worldwide rising towards three-dimensional (3D) VWs and new interaction modalities to which young digital native people are accustomed to. Researches on the educational value of VWs have revealed their potential as learning platforms. However, further studies are always needed in order to assess their effectiveness, satisfactorily and social engagement not only in the general didactic use of the environment, but also for each specific learning subjects, activities and modality. The main challenge is to well exploit VW features and determine learning approaches and interaction modalities in which the didactic actions present added value with respect to traditional education. Indeed, educational VW activities are evolving from the early ones based only on information displaying towards simulated laboratories and new interaction modalities. The main objective of this thesis is to propose new learning methodologies in Virtual Worlds, also experimenting new interaction modalities and evaluating the effectiveness of the support provided. To this aim we first investigate how effectively a 3D city-building game supports the learning of the waste disposal practice and promotes behavior change. The game is one of the results of a research project funded by Regione Campania and is addressed to primary school children. A deep analysis of the didactic methodologies adopted worldwide has been performed to propose a reputation-based learning approach based on collaborative, competitive and individual activities. Also, the effectiveness of the proposed approach has been evaluated. The didactic opportunities offered by VWs when considering new interaction approaches are also investigated. Indeed, if for the last four decades keyboard and mouse have been the primary means for interacting with computers, recently, the availability of greater processing power, wider memories, cameras, and sensors make it possible to introduce new interaction modalities in commonly used software. Gestural interfaces offer new interaction modalities that the primary school children known well and may result accepted also for higher students. To assess the potentiality of this new interaction approach during learning activities we selected Geography as subject, since there is a decreasing interest of the students towards this topic. To this aim the GeoFly system supporting the Geography learning based on a Virtual Globe and on the interaction modalities offered by Microsoft Kinect has been developed. GeoFly is designed for elementary school level Geography students. It enables the exploration of the World by flying, adopting the bird (or aeroplane) metaphor. It also enables the teacher to create learning trips by associating to specific places images, text and videos, to develop learning activities concerning geographically situated scenarios. The proposed approach has been evaluated through a controlled experiment aiming at assessing the effect of the adoption of GeoFly on both the students' attitude towards learning Geography and also on their knowledge. [edited by author]XI n.s

A framework for developing motion-based games

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaNowadays, whenever one intents to develop an application that allows interaction through the use of more or less complex gestures, it is necessary to go through a long process. In this process, the gesture recognition system may not obtain high accuracy results, particularly among different users. Since the total number of applications for mobile systems, like Android and iOS, is close to a million and a half and is still increasing, it appears essential the development of a platform that abstracts developers from all the low-level gesture gathering and that streamlines the process of developing applications that make use of this kind of interaction, in a standardize way. In this case such was developed for the iOS system. At the present time, given the existing environment issues, it is ideal to attract the attention, motivate and influence the greatest number of people into having more proenvironmental behaviors. Thus, as a proof of concept for the developed framework, an educational game was created, using persuasive technology, to influence players’s behaviors and attitudes in a pro-environmental way. Therefore, having this idea as a basis, it was also developed a game that is presented in a public ambient display and can be played by any participant close to the displaywho has a device with iOS mobile system

Developing Interactive Learning for Environmental Issues

The environment is being negatively affected by the behavior of human beings. Climate change, while a natural occurrence, is happening at an unnatural pace, sped up by human actions. Even with these things in mind, it seems an impossible task to get people to move toward positive environmental impacts. While many people are aware of environmental issues, they don’t fully understand what actions are contributing to the problems, what alternative options they have, or how they can help alleviate the problem. With that in mind, I examine how effective interactive design can be at creating a learning environment by utilizing fun and interaction to generate interest which creates an effective, positive learning environment. When it is fun and interactive, people seek information naturally and they associate that new information with positive emotions

Gesture based persuasive interfaces for public ambient displays

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática 2º Semestre, 2011/2012This Master thesis studies how Public Ambient Displays (PAD) can be used as a tool to achieve behaviour change, through persuasive technology. In order to reach the goals of the thesis, an interactive public ambient display system called Motion-based Ambient Interactive Display (MAID) was developed. MAID is driven to motivate behaviour changes regarding domestic energy consumption, through a persuasive game interface based on gesture recognition technology. The developed prototype guides players through the different rooms of a house, where they have to find out what is wrong and practice the correct actions to save energy, using similar gestures to the ones they would use in real life to achieve the same goals. The system provides feedback regarding the consequences of each action, in order to make users aware of the consequences of their actions. The implementation of MAID is based on a purpose built, highly configurable and modular framework. It allows the administrator to fine tune and tweak the application to the necessities of the setup location constraints, by adjusting basic display properties, change image content or even modify the scripted gameplay itself. The scripted game system is flexible enough to allow the repurposing of the framework, beyond the previously defined theme, for future studies. The MAID was subjected to user testing, in order to show that it is possible to create a persuasive PAD interface, using seamless interaction methods, with the currently available technology, and use it to spread awareness of a cause, leading to behaviour change.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - project DEAP (PTDC/AAC-AMB/104834/2008); CITI/DI/FCT/UNL (PEst-OE/EEI/UI0527/201

Development of a Virtual Reality application for stroke rehabilitation

Nowadays, immersive technology is growing exponentially allowing transcendence to other sectors as marketing, education, physics and medicine. The use of this technology on the field of medicine provide the creation of an environment which stimulates and benefits the diagnosis and recovery of a patient. The goal of this project is based on the creation of a virtual reality (VR) application in order to be used by poststroke patients as a rehabilitation treatment. It has been developed using Unity 3D and a tool called VRTK which simulates the controllers. The project has been carried out in collaboration with the Associació de Diversitat Funcional d’Osona (ADFO) and it contains four rehabilitation exercises: elbow flexion, arm flexion leading to touch the face, draw circles and arm flexion leading to touch the lower back. These exercises can be done in a practice environment, where the movements are carried out by an avatar in front of a virtual mirror; or in a game environment. It is divided into four levels, one for each exercise, that consists in making a pizza in a kitchen scene. Moreover, we have designed a configuration menu to choose freely the number of repetitions and the entire time of the game. In addition, it has been tested with healthy people and the results have been analysed. In conclusion, what we pretend with this project is to give a support tool to rehabilitation treatments by providing fun and a realistic and a comfortable vision to a virtual reality.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::3 - Salut i Benesta

The potential of Serious Games to foster learning among children and adolescents with disabilities: A systematic review

Serious Games for children and adolescents with disabilities can enhance their learning and respond to their needs in an inclusive educational setting. The aim of this systematic review is to analyze the potential of Serious Games for children and young people with disabilities, thereby providing an overview of effective Serious Games for schools and practitioners in the field of inclusive education. For this purpose, a systematic review of empirical literature found in the database Education Resources Information Centre (ERIC) was conducted, applying a qualitative content analysis. Findings from the 21 reviewed quantitative and qualitative studies indicate that Serious Games provide effective support for achieving learning objectives in certain school subjects and facilitate optimal conditions for learning. We found that Serious Games have strong potential and can make an important contribution to the inclusion of children and adolescents with disabilities in school