The Project Formerly Known as K005...

It's been another busy fortnight in Leeds. Fifteen days, in fact, if you're counting (and I am - I'm like that). You'd think that things would calm down over the summer, but they stay as busy ever!

I keep promising myself that I'll get round to sorting the formatting on this blog - and getting my ResearchGate profile up to date, and getting a LinkedIn profile together... Ah, well. One step at a time.

I was going to say something more about the Together Through Play project, but I guess before I start drilling down into the detail, I should probably say something about my other research, and how TTP (as it's affectionately known) fits into the rest of my work.

I got interested in the issue of inclusive play through the work I was doing with Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta here at the University of Leeds on upper limb rehabilitation. This is high up in my mind at the moment, because we've just published a paper in the Journal of Usability Studies [1] outlining our experiences!

The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, under the title “Novel Interactive Peer Group Activity Movement Exercise”. We had intended this to abbreviate to iP-GAME, but it was always easier to refer to it by the code assigned to it by the NIHR, which was K005. The project ran from 2008 to 2012, so in fact, it overlapped a fair bit with Together Through Play. But let's dial back a bit further.

The whole project was based on the principle of assisted arm exercise: the idea that for children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy, their motor skills can be improved significantly by regular practice, and that practice can be even more effective if it receives guidance. It's a principle that we've applied with stroke patients as well, and it replicates the sort of activity that a physiotherapist would carry out with a patient. The thing is that physiotherapists are in short supply in the NHS and often patients have to supplement the time they get with a home exercise plan. This got Martin and Bipin interested in developing robotic systems that could provide the kind of support offered by a physio, but in the home. And since the sort of reach/retrieve exercise prescribed for these home exercise plans is dull and repetitive, it seemed logical to give the whole thing a game interface, and they had received an NIHR grant (this one by the catchy code “G006”) to develop a powered joystick that would provide the kind of supported exercise described above by playing a videogame.

This sort of Interactive Computer Play-based therapy (ICP-based therapy) is a hot topic with the Wii, and the Kinect – though this grant was back in 2006, before either arrived on the scene – back when the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (remember those?) was the only kid on the motion controller block. This was where I was brought on board, to help with the User testing and to lead the user-centered design of the games. So, the joysticks and games were duly constructed (by Andrew Weightman, now a lecturer at Manchester Met) and deployed in children's homes for evaluation – you can find more detail in our Journal of Engineering Design paper on the subject [2].

Anyway, the results were promising, but the children who helped with the evaluation told us that really, they played videogames as a social activity, and they wanted a game they could share with their friends. And that was the motivation behind K005, and the “peer group” part of the activity. I mean, multiplayer games – how hard could it be? Well, I'll spare the details for next time, but though I didn't know it at the time, I was taking my first steps on the path of inclusive play...

References

[1] Holt RJ, Weightman APH, GallagherJF, Preston NJ, Levesley MC, Mon-Williams M, Bhakta B (2013) A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment. Journal of Usability Studies pp. 111-126

[2] Weightman APH, Preston N, Holt RJ, Allsop MJ, Levesley MC, Bhakta B (2010) Engaging children in healthcare technology design: developing rehabilitation technology for children with cerebral palsy. Journal of Engineering Design 21 (5), 579-600

Playday!

Wednesday just gone (the 7^th) was Playday (http://www.playday.org.uk/), the “national day for play”! Last year, which was the first time I'd ever heard of Playday, we at the Together Through Play team (which is a grand way of saying “Angharad, Anne-Marie and I”) said “We must do something for that next year...”.

Well, we didn't. Apart from anything else, August's a tough time for organising something ourselves, because all the kids we work with are on school holiday, and because these things don't half take a lot of organising (and I doff my cap to anyone who organised one of the many events going on for this year!). Next year, though... well, next year might be different. We've given ourselves more time this time (*more* than a year, you see), and we're aiming to hook up with an external partner who knows a thing or two about organising summer time play events. So suffice to say, plans are afoot.

Whether they will materialise, remains to be seen – many a slip twixt cup and lip, and I've been in academia long enough not to count my chickens before they hatch, (not to mention acquiring a natty collection of stock phrases!). Hopefully a year gives us good time to get things together – or for everyone to forget I mentioned this if it all comes to naught...

Just two more things:

Inclusive Play have run a survey on, er, Inclusive Play to celebrate Playday: http://www.inclusiveplay.com/playday-survey-2013/

And I've been spending the last few weeks playing around with a Raspberry Pi, PyGame, switch controls and PiFace – it's been a lot of fun, and I look forward to sharing the results...