Jan Henk Annema

Videogames in therapy: a therapist's perspective

This paper describes a user and task analysis that was conducted in order to examine the role of therapists in the use of video games in therapy. The results show that video games were used often, but improvements could be made to make them more effective for the therapist. From these results recommendations for video game design were derived. Recommendations include that a therapeutic video game should be easy to startup and configure, should allow the therapist to support a patient during play, and should support the therapist in tracking a patients performance.

Video games in therapy: a therapist's perspective

This paper describes a user and task analysis, complemented with participatory design sessions, conducted to examine the role of therapists in the use of video games in therapy. The results show that video games were used often, but improvements could be made to make them more effective for the therapist. From these results, design recommendations for video games were derived. Recommendations include that a therapeutic video game should be easy to start–up and configure, yet support calibration and adaptation for a wide variety of impairments, should allow the therapist to support a patient during play and should support the therapist in tracking a patients performance and reporting on his performance.

P-III: A Player-Centered, Iterative, Interdisciplinary and Integrated Framework for Serious Game Design and Development

While reconciling a creative game design process with a complex software engineering process is already a daunting task, serious games add another ingredient to an already volatile mixture: the challenge of crafting an effective learning experience. In order to achieve this strenuous objective, Group T’s e-Media Lab and the Centre for User Experience Research, K.U.Leuven, have developed a player-centered, iterative, interdisciplinary and integrated (P-III) framework. This framework has been developed over the course of five years of research on the design and development of serious games. Hence, P-III is built bottom-up, molded and shaped, tested and refined through several research projects [1,9,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. While P-III also prescribes a specific process, in this paper we limit ourselves to highlighting the four pillars of the P-III framework, and their theoretical underpinnings.

The OCareCloudS project: Toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers.

Design of Web-Based Mini-Games for Language Learning: An Evidence-Based and User-Centred Approach

This paper reports on an ongoing project which aims to develop and evaluate web-based mini-games for language learning in an evidence-based and user-centred approach. In recent years, a shift is taking place towards more learner-centred learning environments, and designers of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software have stressed the need for a user-centred design approach (Colpaert, 2010; Hemard, 2003). In general, there is a growing interest in participatory design, in which users are involved in the design process (co-design), marking a move away from traditional design methods characterized by an expert mind-set (Sanders 2008).