Patient Experience
Patient Experience was a project from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project's team sought to investigate how can games can help in creating an environment which could helps patients through the rehabilitation process of a Total Knee/Total Hip replacement surgery. Due to my previous experience in ActionScript 3, I acted as lead programmer and designed the supporting architecture for the games that were developed during the semester.
Features
The project primarily tacked the following constrains, set by our client, UPMC:
- Give immediate, tangible feedback to the patients
- Provide encouragement to the patients as well as their progress
- The tool should be easier to use and relate to the target demographic.
Here is a 30 second video showcasing our work:
Challenges
The project was challenging due to the following issues
- The main demographic for Total Knee/Total Hip surgery are usually 50-plus years old, due to natural bone/cartilage wear out. This situated our demographic target outside of standard gaming groups demographies
- The client had tried using several game-related products, but in the end they were not used anymore due to abandonment, installation problems and relevancy towards the target demography.
- The patient's focus should be on his daily recovery exercise routine. The games should not distract the patient from his routine.
- Integrate different inputs, like the Wii Balance Board and an inertial measurement unit to the framework.
Results
The client was satisfied with our work at the end of the semester.
- Our approach was building simple games on top of a framework that was highly expandable and easy to install
- The games we focused on were social or casual, which had more appeal to our target group.
- The core concept behind our games was the idea of progress: By playing our games and achievement tracking the patient would know how far along was he in his recovery session. This was the differencing factor of our solution which made it stand out from the other products that the client had tried.
One of the most interesting aspects of this project was realtime tracking of the patient's exercise routines
in order to determine if the patient was doing the exercises correctly or not.
Our games used an inertial measurement
unit (IMU) in order to track range of motion, and a Wii Balance Board for tracking several exercises. For the inertial
measurement unit, I wrote the software required to make it work with our framework: a server in C# (.NET) that read input
from the IMU and an ActionScript API that exposed this data to the games.