Platform of Games for People With Cerebral Palsy to Enhnace Living Adjustment
Cerebral Palsy (CP) is one of the most frequently conditions in childhood, with an incidence of 2 per 1,000 live births. In the EU there is 1.3 out of 15 million persons with CP in the world. This neurological disorder affects body movement, balance and posture and almost always is accompanied by other cognitive or sensory impairments like mental retardation, deafness and vision problems. The severity of these problems varies widely, from very mild and subtle to very profound.
These disabilities lead to an inactive lifestyle which reduces the patient’s physical health, social participation, and quality of life. Therapy costs can be up to €45,000 by year, a cost that cannot be afforded by most of the families. Playing Video games is a useful treatment that promotes and maintains more active and healthful lifestyle in these persons. This in turn contributes to reduce medical and social care cost and improve well-being of their families. However accessibility to videogames is hardly applied for them. GAME-ABLING is to create a software tool for creating interactive video games in an intuitive manner in such a way that non-expert personnel (e.g. parents) can develop customized games. Games will be controlled using body movements and voice. To this end, Computer Vision and image processing techniques will be developed to improve accessibility.
GAME-ABLING will create a web portal to make up a disabled gaming e-community in where users will have access to use the software tool, play games and upload own creations to share it. SMEs envisage GAME-ABLING exploitation following a subscription business model to have full access to the web portal.
GAME-ABLING represents a business opportunity for the SMEs, who expect to reach 0.5% world market penetration and an accumulated income of €9.9 million in 5 years. In addition, GAME-ABLING will contribute to reduce medical and social care costs in the EU by at least 0.5% which supposes additional annual savings of €200 million.
ICCS is a partner of the GAME ABLING PROJECT and mostly invlolved in WP4, WP5 and WP6 activities. The main work that will be performed is the development of an authoring tool for the creation of games, specifically targeted for children with CP and the game platform for the execution of these games. Finally, ICCS will develop an analysis tool for the monitoring and evaluation of the development and progress of the children.
