GalaConf'15 workshop: Games for health

1. GAMIFIED PLATFORM FOR PHYSICAL
AND COGNITIVE REHABILITATION
CARINA GONZÁLEZ*, PEDRO TOLEDO*, ALBERTO MORA**, YERAY BARRIOS*
*UNIVERSIDAD DE LA LAGUNA
**UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA
GALACONF: HEALTH WORKSHOP
ROME, WEDNESDAY, 9TH DECEMBER, 2015

2. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
ROUTEMAP
▸ Introduction
▸ Background
▸ Tango:H
▸ Technology
▸ Validation
▸ Conclusions

3. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

4. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

5. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

7. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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)

8. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

9. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

10. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H PLATFORM (KICK OFF)
▸ Easy and fast setting up:
▸ Users selection
▸ Exercise selection
▸ Enabling mode
▸ Sensor recognition
▸ Starting

11. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H PLATFORM (KICK OFF)

13. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

14. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (FEATURES)
▸ Cognitive: Matching, ordering & classifying

15. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ Body contact points
▸ It allows user interaction
with objectives definition
(assignment)
▸ Currently 13 contact points
enabled for the Kinect
sensor

16. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ Objectives
▸ Achievable elements for one or
more contact points
▸ Components:
▸ Picture (customizable)
▸ Sound (success/fail)
▸ Border color (related with
the colored contact points)

17. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ How to achieve objectives with contact points?
▸ Simultaneous (i.e. two hands), single (i.e. one hand) or
distractor (no interaction needed)

18. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ 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

19. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ Sync & Async

20. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ 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

21. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (ELEMENTS)
▸ Sequential & random

22. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (STRUCTURE)
▸ Exercise 1
▸ Step 1
▸ Phase 1
▸ Objective 1
▸ Contact points
▸ Objective n
▸ Phase n
▸ Step n

23. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

24. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

25. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (REPORTING)
▸ Single and collective statistics (skills, levels, points,
attempts, succeed and fail track, time, emotion, etc.)

26. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TANGO:H DESIGNER (INTERFACE)

27. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

28. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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…

29. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

30. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
TECHNOLOGY
▸ Web version (Tango:H designer)
▸ HTML5 / CSS3
▸ Javascript/JQuery
▸ PHP
▸ XML format for exercise definition
▸ Supports exercise design for Kinect sensor v1, v2

31. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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.

32. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

33. GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15
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

34. 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
GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15

35. 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
GAMES FOR HEALTH WORKSHOP’15

36. THANK YOU…
QUESTIONS?
Alberto Mora
amoraca@uoc.edu
@amoracarreno