Product Info : San Francisco | Type : Team Work | Role : UX/UI Designer, Developer
Goal : To design an Interactive & engaging exercise therapy using Kinect for a Parkinson's people
Activity :
Imagine an assistive living facility that wants to add a tier to the space between physical, or occupational therapy for its clients, and group or class-based PT. In essence, use the Kinect technology to develop an activity that works in the space between those two ends of a spectrum. Design a 7-10 minute exercise routine for this specific audience that is engaging, and easy to use. It gets them up and moving, and is relevant to their lives and needs. Again, it should be stand-alone and self-explanatory.
Scenario:
Our Persona is suffering from Parkinson's disease, which is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects your movement. It starts with a noticeable tremor and gradually ends in stiffness of muscles and slowing of movement.
Design Research :
Causes of the problem: The nerve cells (neurons) in the brain gradually break down or die. Therefore neurons which produces a chemical in the brain decreases leading to abnormal brain activity.
Treatment : Doctors recommend lifestyle changes, especially aerobic exercise. In some cases, physical therapy that focuses on balance and stretching also is important.
User Group : Above 60 years of Age
Persona:
Alex is 70 years old. She loves to have fun and stay active.
As a youngster she was a professional dancer and music lover. She has always been a thrill seeker, engaged in extreme activities like skydiving, snowboarding and gambling. Now, she lives with her friends in a community home where she actively participates in weekly gatherings and small meetings.
User Interaction Flow :
We were testing certain simple gestural movements based on Kinect's viability and for Parkinson's Patients to interact and engage comfortably while playing the game.
Visual Interface Design :
We hand to map each part of the body with Kinect Mapping. So we assigned names as it would be easy to code.
We designed a fun exercise like game to play music with your body. This includes simple movement of your leg and hand to interact with the virtual buttons on screen. But the virtual buttons can be triggered based on physical human movement. These were the interactions we incorporated into coding and made it possible via Kinect. Each button would play a different sound which would make the user engaging and fun to interact. This does completely change the perspective of how we have to perform an activity and there is no age bar to learn and adapt to something fun in life.
When a player is interacting with the buttons virtually it triggers different music based on different touch.
When two players are playing, we want the mirrored the human skeletal image to look like the above visual.
Kinect Coding :
This is an image representing how Kinect was picking up data assigned for each body part. But as I was new to Processing, I had the challenge in learning to coordinate with accurate mapping in Kinect. As the deadline of the project was coming up. I tried to map the whole skeleton with the human body and made it interact with buttons to play and pause music. We also had a special instructor from outside school to guide us on Kinect & Processing.
Testing with rough Images in Kinect coding
Testing with right body parts
Final Version :
This is the final version of visual for the game. Although we got the game to be interactive and design as per requirements. We had difficulties based on bridging the whole skeletal together as one structure. We were coming closer to the deadline of the game so I had to wrap up the game with the required amount of coding expertise. But I believe I could work on this later and fix the code properly.
The two players can play and pause the buttons by touching it.
As the players touch the button each button is triggered with a color to signify which one is playing. By touching it again you can pause the button or Stop playing.
