On Supporting Parkinson's Disease Patients: The i-Prognosis Personalized Game Suite Design Approach

Abstract

The use of serious games in health care interventions sector has grown rapidly in the last years, however, there is still a gap in the understanding on how these types of interventions are used for the management of the Parkinson Disease (PD), in particular. Targeting intelligent early detection and intervention in PD area, the Personalized Game Suite (PGS) design process approach is presented as part of the H2020 i-PROGNOSIS project that introduces the integration of different serious games in a unified platform (i.e., ExerGames, DietaryGames, EmoGames, and Handwriting/Voice Games). From the methodological point of view, to facilitate the visualization of 14 game-scenarios, the system interface and the PD contexts, the storyboarding technique was adopted here. Overall, the realization of the PGS sets the basis for establishing a holistic framework that could aim at improving motor and nonmotor symptoms, in order to inform health care providers and policy makers for its inclusion in routine management for PD.

Innovative Parkinson's Disease Patients' Motor Skills Assessment: The i-PROGNOSIS Paradigm

“…The developed battery of 14 interventional and quality-of-life improving games are based on the following PD-targeted symptomatology: (1) Motor improvement (six games): posture, gait, postural instability, fine motor skills impairment, and tremor; (2) Non-motor improvement (five games): facial expression/depression and constipation; and (3) Speechimprovement (three games): voice and speech difficulties. More detailed information about the design and development of the games can be found in Dias et al (2016Dias et al ( , 2017aDias et al ( ,b, 2018, Savvidis et al (2018Savvidis et al ( , 2019, and Grammatikopoulou et al (2019). The iPrognosis Games differ in the required equipment for playing them, which also defines different target uses; more specifically, (i) games requiring the MentorAge R 2 sensor device (four games) are targeted to be used inside specialized PD clinical centers or at home if the user purchases the sensor device (∼e700), and (ii) games requiring a smartwatch or tablet (with microphone and frontal camera) (10 games) can be played either at a home environment or under supervision in clinical settings.…”

Motion analysis of Parkinson diseased patients using a video game approach

“…Such methods and data can serve as preliminary evidence for further larger and controlled studies to propose such an exergame that can independently detect and adapt its difficulty level to better match players' ability providing a more targeted and personalized rehabilitation option. our proposed approach was implemented within the context of i-Prognosis (Intelligent Parkinson eaRly detectiOn Guiding NOvel Supportive InterventionS), which aims to develop early and unobtrusive Parkinson's disease detection tests based on the interaction of users with their everyday technological devices [22].…”

Assistive HCI-Serious Games Co-design Insights: The Case Study of i-PROGNOSIS Personalized Game Suite for Parkinson’s Disease

“…In fact, seen as hierarchically structured sequence of graphs, the Storyboarding technique has been revealed as common technique in the HCI field and design, for facilitating the demonstration of system interfaces and contexts of use ( Truong et al, 2006 ). Analytical description of all storyboards can be found in Dias et al (2017b) .…”

“…As described in Dias et al (2017b) , an underlying framework is adopted in the i-PROGNOSIS PGS for the design of each game, based on five key transversal aspects (see Figure 1 ), including: (1) Types of data and acquisition means, such as depth cameras, touch screens and tablets; (2) Exchange of data, storing and analysis, such as metrics during the game (in-game metrics), frequency of playing the game; (3) Issues regarding safety and feasibility, such as any possible feedback to avoid injuries; (4) Issues referring to personalization and socialization, such as, how much adaptive are the HCI-SGs to PD patients’ performance; potentialities for group-based playing to promote emulation among the patients; and (5) Systems that provide rewarding and output parameters, such as specific messages that serve as rewards and/or motivational triggers to increase the engagement of the users during the game). More detailed information (including the description of the 14 PGS game-scenarios) can be found in work of Dias et al (2017b) . Taking into account the early stage PD patients’ needs and requirements, the PGS aims to integrate different HCI-SGs in a unified platform, targeting, in a holistic way, PD symptoms (motor and non-motor) by providing a set of games (i.e., ExerGames, DietaryGames, EmoGames, and Handwriting/Voice Games) that address such symptoms within a gamified approach ( Dias et al, 2016a ; Hadjidimitriou et al, 2016 ) (see Table 1 ).…”