Or it will be shortly, and I thought I'd post one more time before the Christmas break and the start of 2014. I had intended to end the year by coming to come conclusions about the whole K005 project, and what we learned from it - but I'll leave that to the New Year.
Instead, the classic way to end the year is with a Year in Review type post! I'm sure you'll be thrilled. It's be an interesting year and no mistake, and as 2013 turns into 2014, there's a sense of a change in eras, for a few reasons. Alexis Lefevre, one of my PhD students, has just successfully passed his viva (congratulations, Alexis!), exploring how age, object size and texture impacted the reach-to-grasp action. He did a really nice piece of work, though to date we've only published one paper from it so far - but if you're interested it's available Open Access via PLOS One:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0069040
It was another piece of Alexis' design that gave me the idea for the prototype manipulandum I was showing off not so long ago - his system of interchangeable and end caps attached to a force sensor, allowing rapid variation of size and texture, is quite ingenious. I'll talk you through it, some time: there are a few interesting results, but I don't want to show off too much before we find out where we are with publications. Mark Mon-Williams and I will hopefully be completing the revised version and wiring it up to Opotrak in the New Year.
The massively talented Ian Flatters, another of my PhD students, is now finishing his time with us - off to take a well-deserved place with a surgical tech company, and awaiting viva. But he's still in Leeds, and will be getting a day a month as a visiting researcher, so it isn't goodbye quite yet.
On top of that, Together Through Play ends in about week - and since neither myself, Angharad or Anne-Marie will be doing any more work before the new year, it is, too all intents and purposes, finished. I've just got to right the report, now!
So, there is more of a sense of wheels turning, and a changing of the guard than usual this year. But of course, that just means new things to look forward to, and I'm hopeful that 2014 is going to be a cracker. Mark Mon-Williams gave a rousing speech to our PACLab (Perception Action Cognition Lab) meeting on Wednesday, and as I wind down to take a break, there's a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming online in the new year. Here's a few:
1) Getting the manipulandum up and running. That'll be a good one - I've taken Alexis' design and run with it, and I'm really excited to keep expanding the grip work that Mark and I have been doing. There are some fresh collaborations coming up related to DCD and Spinal Cord Injury. Exciting stuff!
2) Playday 2014: Having missed every Playday during the course of the project, I promised myself we'd do something for 2014, and Leeds Philosopohical and Literary Society have kindly put money towards running an inclusive play event. So, we've assembled a student team, and we're working with Leeds City Council's Breeze initiative to offer something good this year. We have user panels coming up in February - I can't wait!
3) LUDI - I'm part of an EU-funded COST action (Collaboration on Science and Technology), looking at the issue of play for disabled children, bringing together researchers from across Europe - and beyond! I'm really looking forward to it - it feels like there's a lot of opportunity coming up now!
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It's been interesting getting started with the blog, and I'm still finding my feet. Finding time to blog regularly is much harder than I had imagined, but it's a nice opportunity to get my thoughts and reflections down, so I'll be pressing on in the new year. A few things I'd like to cover are the final outcome of K005, findings from Alexis's PhD, the outcomes of K005, and I'd like to reflect a little more on a recent Twitter discussion on Accessibility vs Inclusivity - it's a really interesting debate, and ties in a lot with what we've discovered in K005. That and the manipulandum, of course!
Anyway, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year - I'll be back in 2014!
Saturday, 21 December 2013
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
The project formerly known as K005... Part 2!
I won't repeat the question about where the time goes. It's been
busy, busy times here in Leeds - three of my research students have
submitted their theses since I last posted, and there are two more in
the process of writing up. And a new one has started. And on top of
that, we're finishing off the Together Through Play project, which is
exciting, but time consuming, especially in the middle of teaching!
Trying to get into schools for the final round of feedback (with
prototypes!) really puts the pressure on!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
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