TheraWack - Physical Therapy for Children
Project Definition, Audience and Scope:
When children sustain neurological or physical damage to the spinal cord, intense exercise or normal motor control becomes impossible to perform. For young children under 12, sustaining these injuries and going through physical rehabilitation may be uncomfortable and scary. Focusing physio-therapy exercises into fun games provides a better, kid-friendly alternative to otherwise boring or scary therapy programs.
Requirements:
- Be a fun, engaging, simple game.
- Able to have one and two verses multiplayer.
- Utilize fun sounds and lights to make game fun and friendly.
- Remember and keep track of a scoreboard.
- Induce randomness to game to keep it interesting and varied.
- Be durable and sustainable.
Product:
We developed a product that was akin to whack-a-mole, which helps the child perform a repetitive task that helps foster more accurate motor skills in children with neurological and physical issues. Made utilizing micro sensors, motors, and an Arduino Uno, we programmed a game that would work almost similarly to an arcade game. You would insert a coin into the game's coin slot and it would bring the user to a start screen with multiple options. This includes 1 player, 2 players, scoreboard, and off. Through C++'s better control over memory management, we programmed the game to save "active games" to start from the same point, saved scores, and to manipulate the motors in a more precise manner. To understand which state led to which state, we needed to create a state machine to make sure that we could cycle through the UI correctly.
Evaluation:
From our research, we tailored specifications with measurable numerics to evaluate our success. In our tests, we saw that children liked the "fun" version of our product verses current equipment used for physical therapy. The product was able to help children achieve a slightly better recovery time (10% faster) for a timed length trial of ~1 month, as the children would be more willing to practice and train using our product verses the current products available. However, about 80% of children (4 of a group of 5) were happy with our product, with the last stating that they weren't interested in this game.