Josef Wiemeyer

Serious games in prevention and rehabilitation—a new panacea for elderly people?

Digital games cannot only be used for fun and entertainment. The term “serious games” (SG) denotes digital games serving serious purposes like education, training, advertising, research and health. Recently, a new generation of games has emerged involving whole-body movements. Compared to traditional interventions, these games may help elderly people to improve their health by enhancing physical fitness and coordinative abilities by combining increased motivation, game experience like fun and game flow and training. Serious games, particularly adventure and shooter games, already play an important role in health education, prevention and rehabilitation, e.g. to enhance health-related physical activity, improve sensory–motor coordination, prevent asthma, change nutrition behaviour and alleviate diabetes and prevent smoking or HIV. In this paper, the impact of SG on prevention and rehabilitation is discussed. Three criteria are applied. Beyond effectivity and efficiency, the additional benefits of serious games can be described and explained by different models including social, psychological, physiological and sensory–motor factors. The quality of study serves as a third criterion. Despite first promising results, there are only few high-quality studies. Adequate content, game interfaces, sustainability and appropriate settings are critical factors for the success of SG. In this regard, (sport) science can help to develop and evaluate SG and test appropriate settings that ensure sustainable use of serious games.

Who should play in which position in soccer? Empirical evidence and unconventional modelling

Because of the many variables, team games are one of the most complex systems one can find in sport. For this reason, deterministic modelling is not appropriate in order to account for the complexity and uncertainty of sport games. Computer scientists have developed several alternative models in order to deal with these complex, uncertain and non-deterministic problems. Fuzzy logic seems to be the appropriate modelling paradigm because this approach allows to deal with diffuse concepts. When coaches are asked which properties qualify players for specific tactical positions they usually operate with such diffuse concepts, e.g., good risk taking or heading capabilities for strikers. Furthermore, a coach may apply some rules for assigning tactical position, e.g. ‘if a player is an excellent goal-getter or he is at the same time a moderate goal-getter, has a good heading capability and is a good risk taker, then he or she should play as a striker’. This kind of reasoning reflects exactly the logic structure of the decision rules proposed by fuzzy logic. For this reason, we interviewed soccer coaches and then applied the concepts of fuzzy logic in order to develop a simulation program that gives recommendations for tactical positions of players, depending on their particular profiles of features. We interviewed 14 coaches and asked them questions concerning the properties and observable criteria of the following tactical positions: - Goalkeeper- Sweeper- Central defender- Midfielders (central vs. wings; offensive vs. defensive)- Striker A questionnaire based on the results of previous studies was developed. This questionnaire consists of 48 items addressing the following aspects: - 9 items concerning the education and basic tactical concepts of the coach- 7 items concerning the properties required for a specific tactical position (pre-arranged items with a 1-to7 agree-disagree scale and the possibility to add items)- 28 items concerning the observable criteria for the properties (open questions)- 3 items concerning the subjective difficulties when completing the questionnaire (1- to-5 very difficult-very easy scale)- 1 open item for comments and recommendations. Based on the concepts of fuzzy logic a computer program was developed in order to simulate the determination of appropriate tactical positions depending on the players’ profile. In the following text this program and its components are introduced. As a first step we differentiated three types of positions (i.e., striker, ‘build-up’ player organising or conducting the offensive play, defensive player) and established the following rules for determining specific positions: - Typical features for a striker are goal-getter qualities, header capabilities, dribbling capabilities and 1 to 1 play.- Features that are relevant to ‘build-up’ players are view, creativity and availability for team mates.- The respective features for the defensive player are covering behaviour, defensive power and hardness. This model is very simple and is just a first approach to the problem; it is possible to change the relevant features and to add new features and tactical positions or both. So the model can be freely adapted to the needs of the users. The proposed interactive program can be used both for simulation and assessment; this may help to improve our knowledge concerning this exciting, and ever popular sport.

Framework for personalized and adaptive game-based training programs in health sport

This paper describes an interdisciplinary approach towards a framework for personalized, game-based training programs for elderly and handicapped people. Adaptation and personalization are proposed as a way to increase the physiological training effects of game-based training programs (exergames). Hereby, the diversity of users and a broad range of physiological handicaps are considered. The framework is based on scientific training programs enhanced by technical methods and concepts for personalized exergames. This includes an authoring environment (StoryTec) which supports game designers and domain experts (sport scientists, medical doctors, therapists, etc.) in the development process and the (personalized) configuration of such exergames. Two prototypically implemented applications (ErgoActive and BalanceFit) demonstrate the usability and adaptation of the underlying training and game concepts for different user groups and provide indicators of the effectiveness and efficiency of the generic framework for particular user groups. For instance, ErgoActive is applicable for people of all ages and both trained and untrained users by being able to provide personalized training levels to improve endurance. Similarly, BalanceFit is useful both for wheelchair and walking frame users in order to maintain and possibly even increase their balance, strength and muscular coordination.

Recommendations for the Optimal Design of Exergame Interventions for Persons with Disabilities: Challenges, Best Practices, and Future Research

A group discussion of individuals with expertise working in the field of exergaming and rehabilitation focused on the issue of designing exergames for persons with disabilities as well as appropriate interventions using exergames. The purpose of these discussions was to develop recommendations for the design, evaluation, and application of exergames in therapy serving as potential guidelines for researchers, developers, and therapists. The following key issues were addressed: (1) Challenges in exergame design for persons with disabilities, (2) adaptation of exergames for persons with disabilities, (3) exergame interventions, and (4) future research directions. It is the hope of the group that the results of these recommendations will help improve the quality of exergame design and interventions and thereby increase opportunities for persons with disabilities to engage sustainably in exergaming.

Serious Games for Solving Protein Sequence Alignments - Combining Citizen Science and Gaming

A fundamental task in computational biology is the identification of similarities between multiple protein sequences, to get insight into their functional, structural and evolutionary relationships. These similarities can be revealed by aligning the sequences. This alignment is a NP-hard problem.

Applying Serious Games to Motor Learning in Sport

Considering the wide use of Serious Games in application fields like cognitive learning, health education and rehabilitation and the recent developments of sensor and interface technology it is surprising that applications to motor learning in sport are rare. The aim of this study is to examine whether a specific learning effect can be elicited by training with a commercial exergame Nintendo Wii Sports Resort. A sample of 23 young club basketball players attended either a virtual training VT or a real training RT of basketball throws. Training consisted of 750 throws distributed to 10 training units. As a result, VT and RT groups improved in virtual and real performance, but only the RT group transferred training to the virtual condition. Furthermore, the RT group enjoyed training more than the VT group. As a conclusion, added values of Serious Games in sport skill learning may take effect only under certain conditions.

Incremental imitation learning of context-dependent motor skills

Teaching motor skills to robots through human demonstrations, an approach called “imitation learning”, is an alternative to hand coding each new robot behavior. Imitation learning is relatively cheap in terms of time and labor and is a promising route to give robots the necessary functionalities for a widespread use in households, stores, hospitals, etc. However, current imitation learning techniques struggle with a number of challenges that prevent their wide usability. For instance, robots might not be able to accurately reproduce every human demonstration and it is not always clear how robots should generalize a movement to new contexts. This paper addresses those challenges by presenting a method to incrementally teach context-dependent motor skills to robots. The human demonstrates trajectories for different contexts by moving the links of the robot and partially or fully refines those trajectories by disturbing the movements of the robot while it executes the behavior it has learned so far. A joint probability distribution over trajectories and contexts can then be built based on those demonstrations and refinements. Given a new context, the robot computes the most probable trajectory, which can also be refined by the human. The joint probability distribution is incrementally updated with the refined trajectories. We have evaluated our method with experiments in which an elastically actuated robot arm with four degrees of freedom learns how to reach a ball at different positions.

Prediction and control of the individual Heart Rate response in Exergames

Setting an appropriate training load is one of the key elements for the success of exergames. Especially for the cardiovascular training, the adaptation of the current training load in accordance to an individually predetermined target training load plays an important role. In this paper, a new approach for the estimation and prediction of an individual’s heart rate based on a monoexponential formula is presented and evaluated using statistical data. The estimation and prediction of the heart rate is a key factor for the calculation of adequate exertion parameters and therefore for the adaptation and personalization of exertion games, i.e. games that use whole-body exercises for game control. The tests reveal that the course of the heart rate response to changes of load bouts is not stable. Only a differential influence of gender on the HR course depending on the particular load bout can be found.

Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports

Serious games became an object of research and development in the last decade. Using computer game technology for serious applications can be very beneficial for a variety of applications. In particular when it is about motivating people through gaming mechanisms, there is a great potential to use gaming technology and the psychological mechanisms that attract people to games for making them do activities that would otherwise either be not done or at least with much less enthusiasm. One such application is personal fitness. So called exergames aim at wrapping physical exercises into computer games. They range from rehabilitation programs to workout programs mimicking a personal trainer.

Personalized Adaptive Control of Training Load in Exergames from a Sport-Scientific Perspective

The following paper addresses the development and first tests of an algorithm for individual control of physical load in Serious Games for Sports and Health. The purpose is to monitor and control the heart rate (HR) as an individual indicator of optimal training load. In the context of the Serious Game “LetterBird”, developed by KOM, a playful and yet effective physical training can be realized. In this game the flight of a pidgeon is controlled by a cycle ergometer. The goal is to collect letters approaching the bird at different altitudes.