My bachelor thesis
At the beginning of 2021 I finished my bachelor thesis. It was about creating, testing and analyzing the effect of a serious game for the treatment of perception disorders. I had originally 5 months time to do this but thanks to COVID-19 and the associated problems with the requirement to test this theory on people I had effectively ~6 months time. This thesis was created in cooperation with the occupational therapy office Auxel (Ger. Ergotherapie Praxis Auxel) and my university the „university of applied science Kempten„.
At the beginning I didn’t know much about the topic, hidden-object-games or how to design such a game. Effectively the goal was to train people with a kind of visual impairment. This disorders can be rooted in psychological or in physical problems. So how to treat it? The occupational therapy is ordered by methods, and the method the company Auxel follows is called „Sensory integration“ (SI). SI is a loosely defined method which try to utilize the bodies own ability for self organization. In layman terms SI trains things in which you or your body is bad at, by using the part of you that curses the problem. It forces your body to find own solutions to live with the problem. A very pragmatic way of doing things.
Occupational therapy loves games. Games make the, often extraordinary boring, training bearable. For example if you have an injury in your lumbrical muscles you have to do the „bla bla“ hand gesture for the training unit (ca. 30-45 min). Playing cards is basically doing the same thing and is far more enjoyable time.
Thanks to Jean Ayres and Marianne Frostig I know now which are the aspects of visual perception to train. Figure-ground-perception (seeing what is in focus/foreground), body-consistency (recognizing something which is partially covert), Visuomotoric speed (the speed you can react to things, different to Hand-Eye coordination) and a bunch of other characteristics helped me create situations for the game.
We decided to use a very simple flat shaded design of the game, so that the target audience can navigate the Software without being stressed by the UI. The paradigm to include everyone also mean that VFX are not a graphics setting, it is a difficulty setting. Moving objects, rapidly changing colors and partial systems are all things that designers use to sale the game but in our case make it harder for the patient to play the game.
At the beginning (February 2020) we had 25 People for the test group and the same amount for the control group. But history made it clear that Covid-19 wasn’t like the other SARS-Viruses and was here to stay. From the originally 50 people were only 5 weeks later 20 people left in total and only 9 of them appeared regularly enough to create a full dataset in time for the thesis. Obviously with such a small amount of data can nothing of interest (at best trends) be proven. So due to the fact that we were in a so early stage, we change the target of the thesis. My job was now to create the trainings software and to test if the planed workflow would be doable if we had the resources. The study was an unnegotiable part of the thesis and ended up to being the biggest time sink of the whole project.
Despite the bad odds we managed to pull everything through. The game and its structure was created and the Professors were happy with the results. I have plans to improve the game with more layers of gameplay, features and more games of treating different problems. If it is round enough, a tablet port and a release wouldn’t be unthinkable.I am so thankful for all the work and support the therapists invested, and I’m happy to see them happy with the outcome.