iCTuS-L
A rehabilitation and research game for incomplete spinal cord injury patients
Full Name: iCTuS-L
Made By: ETH Institute of Neuroinformatics
Made For: University Hospital Balgrist
Plattforms: PC
Roles in Project: Game Concept, Game Design, Therapist Menu Graphics, Game Graphics
Idea
Background
Rehabilitation is a painful and rocky road for patients with incomplete spinal cord injury. The same foot and leg exercises need to be repeated hundreds of times on a daily basis. Additionally, phantom pains can often manifest in patients, where they perceive injured limbs as under immense pain, even though it is not necessarily true or often impossible to feel. Under the research group of Dr. Kynan Eng, a device and Software suite was developed to not only replace exercises with fun and engaging minigames, but also research the possibility to minimize phantom pains through the depiction of healthy limbs in a virtual space.
Gameplay:
iCTuS-L is using a self-developed foot controller pair and software to give therapists the possibility to register and analyse users on their performance. A menu also allows them to make changes to the games difficulty and cadence to meet every patients need.
The exercise games themselves that were developed vary in style, rules and motions that need to be performed. A tron-esque hacky-sack game might ask you to quickly lift your leg to flip the ball from one foot to the other. A space highway might ask you to move your legs out of the way of incoming space vehicles. And a giant hamster pool party will have joyful hamsters periodically board your feet for you to flip them in the air for amazing jumps into the pool.
All performance of patients can be extracted out of the system vial csv or xls, allowing for therapists to properly store and analyze any patients data.
Design:
The mini games of iCTuS-L might seem simple, but their design has been among the hardest in my career. There are a number of special challenges that come with the subject matter. For one, no physical harm was allowed to be done to the virtual legs, since, if the depiction of healthy legs could relieve phantom pains, so could the depiction of hurting them cause it. It was a very hard boundary to have the legs be the main point of interaction, but nothing that could happen to them, which had to be worked around in unexpected ways (like the cars on the highway driving away last second).
In a similar vein, every game had to work with random seeds (since patients craved diversity), definable difficulty (since therapists wanted that control) and repeatable patterns (since researched needed to compare data). A lot of work went into the combustibility that all these needs could be enabled and even mixed.
Impressions
