Purpose

The purpose of this project is to develop a video game that will teach ankle rehabilitation exercises and motivate patients to complete them on schedule. The game will involve mapping rehabilitation exercises to game mechanics (ie: flexing an ankle = shoe sword fighting) and then providing accurate feedback to correct rehabilitation errors (ie: incorrect exercises = losing a match). Because rehabilitation builds on itself, naturally progressing from slow, basic movements to a more active and complex sequence of movements, our game will have to scaffold itself to include early exercises as the basis for more advanced ones. The main audience for this video game is patients who have sprained or twisted an ankle badly enough to need to rest it for at least a day.

Context

Minor ankle twists and sprains are some of the most common injuries people experience. Because the treatments for these injuries are often misunderstood, they can fail to fully heal, leading to increased risk of repeated ankle twists and sprains for the patient. Even when patients know the correct rehabilitation procedure, it can be hard to stick to the exercise regimen once mobility is regained. Often the business of living life causes patients to skip exercises sporadically or quit the rehabilitation altogether. We would like to develop a video game that could offer a solution to all these problems.

Using the Kinect with the XBox 360 or Windows PC, we can detect body position and muscular movements, as long as they aren't extremely fine motor skills (e.g. surgical cutting and stitching). By comparing the patient's body position and muscular movements to the standards for a given exercise, our video game will be able to tell if the patient is doing an exercise incorrectly, and if so can provide appropriate feedback. Each exercise will be scaffolded according to difficulty and its place in the rehabilitation procedure. We also hope to create a fun, possibly social environment, which will motivate patients to continue the exercises.

Role

Section Manager/Contributor

• Collaborate on all sections

• Section manager for Summative Evaluation, Contextual Analysis, and Needs Assessment

• Contribute to Appendix A/B, Table of Contents, and References as necessary.

Working as a team on this design project turned out to be a challenge and a great opportunity. Our project manager Joe had the original idea and the contacts we needed in order to conduct analysis and plan our solution and evaluation. More importantly, we had a definite sense that our project was situated in the real world: Joe had us in contact with a physician interested in the concept, who had a team of volunteer programmers ready to begin development of a rehabilitation game based on our design.

Joe had the least time to devote to the project, so the other three of us stepped up to take primary roles in scheduling, communication, writing, and design.

As an instructional system, the ankle rehabilitaion game needed to include an interface that was easy to understand and an audio script that would coach the learner through each exercise, responding to the learner's actions. As we approached our deadline for the project, Joe had created a screenshot of how the application might appear, but had not annotated it to reflect the interaction occurring. To envision, describe, and depict these elements working together, I created the storyboards shown at the very end of the PDF (Appendix B).

The storyboards came as somewhat of an afterthought in the final stages of our design plan; had they come much sooner, at least as simple text and wireframe, they could have guided our design much better and unified our vision of what we were setting out to create.