PreviewLabs

Can video games help treat neurological disorders like Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI)? KU Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel wanted to find out and contacted PreviewLabs to prototype a series of serious games in a project called iVision.

What Is Cerebral Visual Impairment?

CVI is caused by the brain’s difficulty in processing visual information. It actually is not a problem with the eyes themselves. It occurs when the visual pathways in the brain, responsible for interpreting what the eyes see, are not functioning correctly.

“Researchers at KU Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel were looking for ways to treat CVI through serious games”

Patients with CVI experience a variety of visual challenges, including difficulty recognizing faces, judging distances, navigating environments, and interpreting visual information.

Treatment Through Serious Games

The problem with treating CVI is that it needs a very personalized approach, requiring frequent input from clinicians. With iVision, the researchers were looking for ways to treat it through serious games that do not require a lot of manual input by medical professionals.

Four Games, Six Skills

The iVision project contains four serious games, each designed to train specific skills CVI patients struggle with:

• Visual discrimination and matching;
• Object or picture recognition;
• Visual or spatial perception;
• Figure-ground perception;
• Motion perception;
• Visual short-term memory.

A medical professional can finetune the games through a set of parameters to match the skill level of the player.

These four games help patients develop these skills further:

• In MatchMaker, the player has to match two images based on visual information.
• Hurricane Chaos  is a type of hidden object game, in which the player has to click items described in audio prompts.
• In Maze Expolorer 2D, the player has to get from point A to point B in a maze. In the first iteration of the prototype, the player has to select the right path from a set of options, in the second, they actually have to navigate the maze based on a small minimap that shows the proper route.
• Maze Explorer 3D is a harder variant of the 2D maze. In this game, the player has to select the right direction to go in a 3D maze based on a 2D minimap.

Two Iterations

The iVision prototype was developed in two iterations. In the first iteration, we developed a first version of the games. Before you start playing, you can adjust the parameters that determine the skill level of the player. Based on how these are set up, the tasks in the games will be altered to make them more or less challenging. For example, you can add noise to the images in the MatchMaker game or select an option in which players have to match items with pictures taken from a different viewpoint.

In the second iteration, the prototype looked a lot more visually appealing. We also included a reward system in which the player can collect stars. For every correct answer in a game like MatchMaker, a multiplier is added to this star reward. When they make a mistake, the multiplier resets to one. In this iteration, some of the games were adjusted or expanded upon

The players will experience the various games through several difficulty levels.. For example, in the 3D maze, some players might only get to see the minimap of their route at the start of the game and have to memorize it. To determine the difficulty level, researchers will do an assessment with the patients to determine their skill level. This way, they get to train and develop  specific skills.

Using the Prototype in Research

With the second iteration of the iVision prototype ready, researchers at KU Leuven set out to study the effectiveness of these games in CVI treatment. The results of this study were promising, noting that the games themselves could still be optimized in later iterations, but that serious games are a good medium to help treat CVI.

Push the Boundaries of Healthcare, Start With a Prototype

iVision is one of many prototypes we developed to test the new approaches to healthcare. Curious to see if your idea holds up? Reach out to start prototyping your vision to life.