Background: Innovative technologies such as game consoles and smart toys used with games or playful approaches have proven to be successful and attractive in providing effective and motivating hand therapy for children with cerebral palsy (CP). Thus, there is an increased interest in designing and implementing interventions that can improve the well-being of these children. However, to understand how and why these interventions are motivating children, we need a better understanding of the playful elements of technology-supported hand therapy.Objective: This scoping review aims to identify the playful elements and the innovative technologies currently used in hand therapy for children with CP.Methods: We included studies that design or evaluate interventions for children with CP that use innovative technologies with game or play strategies. Data were extracted and analyzed based on the type of technology, description of the system, and playful elements according to the Lenses of Play, a play design toolkit. A total of 31 studies were included in the analysis.Results: Overall, 54 papers were included in the analysis. The results showed high use of consumer technologies in hand therapy for children with CP. Although several studies have used a combination of consumer technologies with therapeutic-specific technologies, only a few studies focused on the exclusive use of therapeutic-specific technologies. To analyze the playfulness of these interventions that make use of innovative technologies, we focused our review on 3 lenses of play: Open-ended Play, where it was found that the characteristics of ludus, such as a structured form of play and defined goals and rules, were the most common, whereas strategies that relate to paidia were less common. The most commonly used Forms of Play were physical or active form and games with rules. Finally, the most popular Playful experiences were control, challenge, and competition.Conclusions: The inventory and analysis of innovative technology and playful elements provided in this study can be a starting point for new developments of fun and engaging tools to assist hand therapy for children with CP.
Gaming Horizons is a EU-funded project that explored the role of video games in culture, the economy and education. We engaged with more than 280 stakeholders through interviews, workshops and webinars.
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In this paper we present a method to detect the three dimensional position and orientation of a Wii Remote with one or more emissive spheres attached to it, providing an input device that has six degrees of freedom. Unlike other systems, our system can focus in different directions surrounding the user, with a high precision, and at a low cost. We describe the way object-, motion- and orientation tracking is done, as well as the applicability of the final product. We further describe how to improve the noisy data that is retrieved from the sensors of the Wii Remote, how to smooth detected positions, and how to extrapolate position and orientation.
