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!