Project Title

Project title:
Academic keywords:
·  Human-Computer Interaction
·  Information and Communication Technology
·  Health, Rehabilitation and Self-training
·  Social Network and Sharing
·  Serious Games and Gamification
Name of project proposer: Research Assistant Kasper Hald (PhD candidate)
Associate Professor Hendrik Knoche
Department: Architecture, Design & Media Technology
Academic description of the project:
Stroke rehabilitation is costly and leaves time for motivated patients to train if they can carry out relevant activities unassisted, find them beneficial and can muster the initiative to engage with them. Clinicians are urged to embrace evidence based practice and adjust treatments according to the patients’ condition and progress, requiring digital versions of standard tests that are expensive to administer. Additionally, digital tests can record valuable temporal data to improve diagnostics and monitoring of chronic patients. Unlike standardized tests, games support varying degrees of difficulty.
The PhD project is a continuation of the Rehab App project in cooperation with Brønderslev Neurorehabilitation Center (BNC) about two touch-screen games in cognitive health assessment and self-training of patients with acquired brain damage. After a deployment study at BNC the results show high correlation between the patients’ game performance and their condition. Patients have reported that their game scores have helped them train their attention and notice their cognitive deficits. The rehabilitation center has found the apps user-friendly enough to activate the patients without staff involvement. From the previous work, the PhD project is initiated with a large data set of game sessions, including reaction time and coordination parameters.
The proposal is to further develop the apps for remote self-training, whether the target audience is the elderly or stroke patients. This will require developing machine learning approaches to adapt the difficulty over time depending on the player’s performance, as to maintain motivation. The project will also involve research in features outside of the games themselves that can add to the incentive for frequent use. These features include detailed graphical representation the user’s performance over time as well as sharing results and playing schedules with next of kin. Sharing these types of results with others carries huge potential for encouragement, but also the risk of causing anxiety due to perception of the results as medical data, giving the impression that the user is constantly under examination.
In addition to cooperation with the university and institutions with access to the particular audience, depending on the agreed focus of the project, the company can gain the following from the partnership:
·  State of the art insight in user requirement and user design guidelines for remote training applications for the elderly and/or cognitively impaired.
o  Human-computer interaction design guidelines for unassisted initiation and performance.
o  Methods for conveyance of performance over a long period of time.
o  Game design guidelines for a demographic that is technologically inexperienced and/or affected by age or stroke-related deficits.
·  A novel model of patients and their response/behavior in relation to gamification incentives.
o  The intrinsic motivation of the user based on a combination of game performance and the gain of insight into their own cognitive condition.
o  The effects of including the social network in user’s self-training effort; family, friends and/or fellow patients.
·  Deployment guidelines for self-training apps in a hospital setting as well as the home of the target group for either research or commercial purposes.
·  Implementation guidelines for machine learning and difficulty scaling based on user behavior.
·  Guidelines for large-scale data gathering/processing for touch-based systems.