Resumen de Serious games for visually impaired players and to promote first-aid protocols
José Antonio Rodríguez Benítez
Serious games are games designed to entertain and also to teach or transmit some knowledge. They are present in many areas such as military, health, manufacturing, education or medicine, just to name a few. One of their main advantages is their capability to recreate scenarios to experiment with situations that otherwise would be impossible in the real world due to required safety, cost, and time. In addition, serious games enhance the development of analytical and spatial, strategic, or psychomotor skills.
Unfortunately, despite the advantages of serious games there are still some aspects that need further research and development. On the one hand, there are communities such as visually impaired players which have many difficulties to access them since most of serious games rely on impressive graphics and immersive visual experiences. On the other hand, there are topics of relevant importance such as first-aid protocols that have been considered but only taking into account players with experience on the topic. With the aim to overcome these limitations and exploit serious games advantages as much as possible, in this thesis we have centered our interest on two main focus of research.
The first focus of research, has been centered on how to make serious games (and video games in general) more accessible to players with visual impairments. To reach this objective we have done two main contributions. The first one is a device for visually impaired people to interact with virtual scenes of video games. The device has been designed considering as main features usability, economic cost, and adaptability. Regarding usability, we have considered the white cane paradigm since this is the most used device by the blind community. The proposed device supports left to right movements, collision detection and actions to manipulate scene objects such as drag and drop. To enhance realism, the device integrates a sound library. To reduce the economic cost, we have used Arduino as the basis of our development. The device can be adapted to different game engines. The second contribution is a serious game based on sound and tactile interaction designed to teach the cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) protocol to players with visual impairment. The game denoted CPRforBlind is composed of different mini-games inspired by the CPR steps proposed by European Resuscitation Council. Both proposals have been tested in real scenarios obtaining very promising results.
The second focus of research, has been centered on how to extend serious games to first-aid survival procedures considering players with and without experience on the topic. To reach this objective we have centered our interest on CPR protocol and the protocol to be applied in case of choking victims. We have done three main contribution. The first one is a study on how the gender of victims in virtual scenarios can impact on player performance when practicing CPR protocol. Different emergency scenarios with victims of different genders have been modeled and integrated in a serious games designed to learn CPR. Student from the Nursery Faculty have solved the emergencies while different performance parameters were evaluated. From the study, it has been seen that performance is not influenced by victim gender. The second and third contributions have been two serious games designed to promote the CPR and the choking protocol to non-experts on the topic. Both games have been designed as a set of mini-games that reproduce the main steps of these first-aid protocols. Games have been implemented and tested in real scenarios with very satisfactory results.
From the research carried out in the context of thesis, we can conclude that serious games have been extended to new player profiles and also to new topics.
