[ARTICLE] New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments – Full Text

Abstract:

The work presented here suggests new ways to tackle exergames for physical rehabilitation and to improve the players’ immersion and involvement. The primary (but not exclusive) purpose is to increase the motivation of children and adolescents with severe physical impairments, for doing their required exercises while playing. The proposed gaming environment is based on the Kinect sensor and the Blender Game Engine. A middleware has been implemented that efficiently transmits the data from the sensor to the game. Inside the game, different newly proposed mechanisms have been developed to distinguish pure exercise-gestures from other movements used to control the game (e.g., opening a menu). The main contribution is the amplification of weak movements, which allows the physically impaired to have similar gaming experiences as the average population. To test the feasibility of the proposed methods, four mini-games were implemented and tested by a group of 11 volunteers with different disabilities, most of them bound to a wheelchair. Their performance has also been compared to that of a healthy control group. Results are generally positive and motivating, although there is much to do to improve the functionalities. There is a major demand for applications that help to include disabled people in society and to improve their life conditions. This work will contribute towards providing them with more fun during exercise.

1. Introduction

For a number of years, the possibility of applying serious games for rehabilitation purposes has been thoroughly investigated [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. It is often claimed that serious games reduce health system costs and efforts as they enable in-home rehabilitation without loss of medical monitoring, and in so doing provide an additional fun factor for patients [22,23,24]. Multiple reviews have summarized the very powerful contributions and reveal that the systems are generally evaluated as feasible, but no state of general applicability has yet been reached [2,3,5,7,11,13].

Most studies are quite specialised and tend to cover the same groups of largely elderly patients (e.g., stroke and Parkinson’s), which do not constitute a credible target group per se for gaming among the population. In addition, the impression is that the same functionalities are being tested repeatedly, without any evolution. Above all, other groups like children and adolescents with chronic diseases are rarely addressed, even though they are an excellent target group and would probably benefit greatly from using exergames as they need to move like any other child but are mostly limited to performing their exercises with a physiotherapist. This is generally boring, time-consuming and prevents them from playing with friends during this time. If instead they could play games involving physical exercises, without it feeling like rehabilitation, due to proper immersion and motivation, they would possibly need fewer sessions with the therapist, which may in turn improve their social life. Commercially available games would be good enough for many children with physical disabilities, if only they were configurable and adaptive to their potential and needs. Remote controls (RC) are typically not sufficiently configurable (button functions cannot be changed or the RC cannot be used with one hand) and are only made for hands (why not for feet or the mouth?) Some RCs are not sufficiently precise in detection, and so the user ends up tired and loses motivation. Motion capture devices like the Kinect sensor seem to provide better prerequisites for exergaming purposes but feature important limitations too, (e.g., detection of fine movements and rotations) such that the needs of many people are still not be covered by commercial solutions.

However, this is not due to the sensors, but rather the software, which lacks configurability for special needs, such as simple adjustments of level difficulties or the option of playing while seated. For the latter, some Kinect games are available [29], but those are hardly the most liked ones, as has been stated by affected users [30]. Therefore, more complex solutions are required to adapt a game to problems like muscle weaknesses (most games require wide or fast movements), spasticity (“strange” movements are not recognized) or the available limbs (for instance configuring a game to be controlled with the feet for players without full hand use).

To fill these gaps, the authors of the work presented here are pursuing the overall aim (as part of a long-term project) of creating an entertaining exergaming environment for adventure games that immerses the players into a virtual world and makes them forget their physical impairments. Knowledge of the gaming industry is applied to create motivating challenges that the users have to solve, which are sufficiently addictive to make the exercises pass to an unconscious plane. The gaming environment is configurable to the user’s potential and requirements. Challenges will be programmable by a therapist and will also adapt themselves to the players automatically real-time, by observing their fatigue or emotional state (lowering the difficulty or switching to more relaxing exercises when needed)…

Figure 8. Different scenes while the volunteers were playing. (a) “The Paper-Bird”, (b) “The Ladder”, (c) “The Boat” and (d) “Whack-a-Mole”.

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[WEB SITE] Seizures in Children and Adolescents Aged 6-17 Years – Medscape

Introduction

A seizure is a brief change in normal electrical brain activity resulting in alterations in awareness, perception, behavior, or movement. Seizures affect persons of all ages, but are particularly common in childhood. There are many causes of seizures in children, including epilepsy; high fever (febrile seizures); head injuries; infections (e.g., malaria, meningitis, and gastrointestinal illness); metabolic, neurodevelopmental, and cardiovascular conditions; and complications associated with birth.^[1–3] Outcomes associated with single or recurring seizures in children vary by seizure type (febrile compared with nonfebrile) and multiple risk factors (age, illness, family history, and family context). Outcomes range from no complications to increased risk for behavioral problems, epilepsy, or sudden unexpected death.^[3–6] No nationally representative estimates have been reported for the number of U.S. children and adolescents with seizures, co-occurring conditions, or health service utilization. To address these information gaps, CDC analyzed combined data on children and adolescents aged 6–17 years from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the period 2010–2014. Overall, 0.7% of children and adolescents (weighted national estimate = 336,000) were reported to have had at least one seizure during the preceding year. Compared with children and adolescents without seizures, a higher percentage of those with seizures were socially and economically disadvantaged. Children and adolescents with seizures had higher prevalences of various mental, developmental, physical, and functional co-occurring conditions than those without seizures; however, only 65.6% of those with seizures had visited a medical specialist (defined as a medical doctor who specializes in a particular medical disease or problem, other than an obstetrician/gynecologist, psychiatrist, or ophthalmologist) during the preceding 12 months. Public health agencies can work with other health and human service agencies to raise awareness about childhood seizures, implement strategies to prevent known causes and risk factors for seizures, study the associations between sociodemographic characteristics and seizure incidence, and ensure linkages for children with seizures to appropriate clinical and community providers.

NHIS is an ongoing annual, nationally representative multistage household survey of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/about_nhis.htm). CDC analyzed combined 2010–2014 NHIS data from the Sample Child component (questions asked about one randomly selected child from each family in the NHIS), with an average final response rate of 70%. Because these data do not distinguish the relatively large proportion of young children who experience usually benign febrile seizures* from those who have seizures of other etiologies,^[7] only children and adolescents aged 6–17 years were selected for analysis. Those whose parents provided a “Yes” answer to the survey question, “During the past 12 months, has [your child] had any of the following conditions?” and indicated “seizures” were identified as respondents with seizures.

Multiple outcomes reported by parents of those with and without seizures were examined, including indicators of food insecurity; co-occurring conditions (e.g., neurodevelopmental disabilities, recent infectious illnesses), functional limitations, and taking prescription medications; barriers to care, represented by delaying getting care and being unable to afford care in the past 12 months; access to care or health service utilization in the past 12 months; and the number of missed school days associated with any illness or injury.

Multiple logistic regression was used to calculate the prevalences and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of co-occurring conditions and barriers and access to care, adjusted by sex, race/ethnicity, family poverty income ratio,^† and mother’s highest level of education, for children with and without seizures. Statistical software was used to account for the NHIS complex survey design and sample child weights. Prevalences were considered statistically significantly different if their CIs did not overlap.

During 2010–2014, parents of 0.7% of children and adolescents aged 6–17 years (weighted national estimate = 336,000) reported that their child had seizures during the past 12 months ( Table 1 ). Children and adolescents with seizures were significantly more likely than those without seizures to live in poverty and low-income families or households (41.6% compared with 28.6%), and were less likely to have mothers or fathers with a bachelor’s degree or higher (20.4% compared with 30.6% and 22.4% compared with 34.0%, respectively), or to live in nuclear families or households^§ (30.3% compared with 41.9%). Parents of children with seizures also were more likely than parents of children without seizures to report worrying that food would run out (34.5% compared with 22.9%) or that food they bought would not last until they had money to get more (30.9% compared with 19.2%).

Co-occurring conditions were generally more frequently reported by parents of children and adolescents with seizures than by those without seizures ( Table 2 ). Children with seizures had higher reported prevalences of mental or developmental co-occurring conditions, including learning disabilities (43.7% compared with 8.2%); other types of developmental delay (32.3% compared with 4.3%); intellectual disability (22.9% compared with 1.0%); and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/attention deficit disorder (19.3% compared with 10.3%) than did children without seizures. Parents of children with seizures more frequently reported that their children had headaches or migraines (23.7% compared with 7.0%), hay fever (19.0% compared with 11.2%), and stuttering or stammering (11.3% compared with 1.6%). In addition, children with seizures were more frequently reported to have an impairment or health problem that limited their abilities to crawl, walk, run, or play (23.7% compared with 1.9%); to require special equipment because of impairment or health problems (21.4% compared with 1.1%); and to have taken prescription medication for ≥3 months (68.7% compared with 15.6%) ( Table 2 ).

A significantly higher percentage of parents of children and adolescents with seizures reported delays in getting health care than did parents of children without seizures (14.4% compared with 8.8%) ( Table 3 ). Children and adolescents with seizures were significantly more likely to see different types of health care providers, but 34.4% had not seen a medical specialist during the past 12 months. During the same time period, 41.0% of children and adolescents with seizures visited an emergency department, compared with 15.4% of children and adolescents without seizures. Children and adolescents with seizures reportedly missed six or more school days associated with any illness or injury significantly more frequently than did children and adolescents without seizures (41.9% compared with 14.3%) ( Table 3 ).

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Source: Seizures in Children and Adolescents Aged 6-17 Years