A Haptic Serious Augmented Reality Game for Motor Assessment of Parkinson's Disease Patients

Abstract

In the clinical community there is a need for assessment tools that allow for objective, quantitative and valid measures of motor dysfunction. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a serious game that engages patients with Parkinson's disease in upper extremity (hand/arm) movements. The game employs augmented reality to show virtual movement targets, i.e. candies falling from a conveyor belt, and a haptic game controller to catch the candies, that is able to acquire quantitative data about the patient's movement. This paper first describes the design process of the game and the system components. Secondly, we present results of our small quantitative evaluation study (N=11, age: 26-60, healthy persons) regarding the usability of the system, the task load and user experience of the game. Our findings show that the system has a relatively good usability and the game is engaging, but there is still need for technical improvement with regard to tracking the controller in 3D space.

Human–virtual character interaction: Toward understanding the influence of haptic feedback

“…12 Most studies exploring haptic vest usage have either focused on the development process of the equipment or the development of applications relating to the use of haptic feedback for the navigation and guidance of users in unknown environments using vibrotactile stimulation or thermal actuators. 13 Haptic vests have been used in a number of different training scenarios, including tactical training, 14 medicine, 15 rehabilitation, 16 and serious games used in learning environments. 17 It is believed that the appropriate haptic pattern of a vibration produced by a haptic vest may be an important factor in improving the level of realism provided for the user.…”

Towards Engaging Upper Extremity Motor Dysfunction Assessment Using Augmented Reality Games

“…Following experiments with healthy users [8], [16], we conducted a study that specifically explored the usability and engagement of different puzzle types (colors/images), interaction modalities (grasping/pointing) and presence of visual feedback of virtual hand (yes/no) in augmented reality. In this study, 20 patients (10 PD patients and 10 stroke patients) performed hand/arm movement tasks in four different conditions in AR and one condition in real world (see Figure 2).…”

Open-source data management system for Parkinson’s disease follow-up

“…The development of any system for the management of biomedical data should be followed by evaluating its usability, which aims to understand whether a such system is easy to use and has the appropriate functionality for the users. A method commonly employed to assess usability is the System Usability Scale (SUS), which has been applied in several situations such as the evaluation of a mobile application that helps to improve gait in people with PD (Garzo et al, 2018), an augmented reality game to evaluate the extremity of upper limb impairment in stroke (Bank et al, 2018) and PD patients (Bank et al, 2018;Van der Meulen et al, 2016), evaluating a mobile application for mental health monitoring that collect physiological signals, activity, and environmental data (Kamdar & Wu, 2016), testing the usability of augmented reality software in food advertising via smartphone (Wijaya, Munandar & Utaminingrum, 2019), learning evaluation of a management web system (Katsanos, Tselios & Xenos, 2012), evaluation of a multimedia interface for learning English (Devy, Wibirama & Santosa, 2018), and also to test e-commerce application on smartphones (Indriana & Adzani, 2017).…”