If you were told to go home everyday and move your wrist up and down for an hour, would you do it?
A large number of patients told to go home and do consistent physical therapy cannot keep up with their regiments due to excessive boredom and pain.
This is where gamification comes in. By creating fun, interactive, and habit-forming games, we can decrease patient recovery time while increasing the patient's overall quality of life.
Who said recovery had to be boring?
#1
Design a Basic Game for Android
The first stage of the design process was to construct a basic android game that could pair with the 3-D printed exoskeleton arm.
To do this, we created RoboRockNRoll, a rhythm based game where the player had to use his/her wrist to move a pick up and down to catch music notes coming across the screen in time with a song.
#2
Switch to a Multi-Platform System
In order to reach a larger audience, the next step is to switch to a multi-platform system. In this case, we chose to switch to Unity to handle all graphics and game design.
#3
Create many small mini-games
After we have switched to Unity, we'll begin to develop a variety of fast mini-games to help alleviate boredom with the system.
#4
Put the mini-games together into one big multi-player game
Finally, we'll put the mini-games together to make one large game (similar to Mario Party or WarioWare). The game will be multi-player and offer various levels of difficulty, allowing players of any ability to play. This will encourage comradery and competitive spirit that will help keep patients interested in playing.
