Abstract
Cerebral visual impairment (CVI), a leading cause of visual impairment in developed countries, has no standard treatment and many different manifestations. Long-term individualized therapy is crucial for children with CVI to develop coping strategies and improve functional limitations. Serious games are becoming a part of many different types of therapy and rehabilitation, including physical rehabilitation, cognitive behavioral therapy, vision therapy, etc. However, the design of the serious games used in the context of rehabilitation and therapy must ensure that the games fulfill the therapeutic goals and also adapt to the skills and abilities of the players. Entry-level estimation, i.e., placing the player in a correct initial game level the first time the player engages with the game, is an important aspect of individualization and personalization of serious games.
In this paper, we discussed the importance of adaptivity and personalization of serious games in children with CVI, specifically focusing on entry-level difficulty estimation and the comparison of two entry-level estimation models. The first model was defined based on discussions with experts in the CVI therapy field and the second was a linear regression model trained on in-game collected data. We evaluated the two models on several performance metrics and compared how the entry-level estimation using the first versus second formula would differ for the children participating in our currently ongoing Randomized Control Trial.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-project) [grant number is T004920N].
Parents provided written informed consents and in case of young children, verbal assent was given where possible but researchers monitored participants closely for reluctance to participate.
The authors would like to thank Centrum Ganspoel, the Center for Developmental Disabilities, and the special schools involved in the study for their willingness to provide us the opportunity to collaborate with them and their children. We would like to thank the caregivers and therapists living with and working with children with CVI, parents of the children, and the children themselves.
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of their master students Anouk Schaerlaeken, Els Coenen, and Wouter Donkers in following up the children, the families, and the schools who are enrolled in the RCT.
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Kostkova, K., Ben Itzhak, N., Stijnen, L., Ortibus, E., Jansen, B. (2023). Entry-Level Game Difficulty Estimation Based on Visuoperceptual Profiles of Children with Cerebral Visual Impairment. In: Haahr, M., Rojas-Salazar, A., Göbel, S. (eds) Serious Games. JCSG 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14309. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44751-8_6
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