Pierpaolo Di Bitonto

Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2009, with a thesis on recommender systems, he is currently Head of Research and Development area at Grifo multimedia s.r.l. He has written and run more than 20 projects in the area of healthcare and wellness using game-based approaches. His research interests are in serious games, gamification, recommender systems and affective and social computing with a special focus on wellness and healthcare. He is currently working with his research team on a new technology able to adapt serious games according to the physical and cognitive experience of the player.

PRESENTATION

Adaptive games for physical and cognitive rehabilitation
Rehabilitation activities in many cases are focused on the (re)education of specific skills (cognitive, physical, behavioral) that are lost due to traumatic events or diseases. Likewise, therapies for learning disorders in the pediatric age aim to teach abilities that children have not yet learned.

In this context, it is necessary to define and contain users’ stress level as well as to evaluate how much it can impact on cognitive performance, considering not only the ability they show the game as the only adaptation parameter.

The proposed solution, the BFA (BioFeedback Analyzer), aims to improve the therapy’s effects by enhancing the game experience. It is an innovative system, based on the integration of wearable sensors and algorithms, that allows real time data collection about stress-related users’ biofeedback and game context.

The data collected are used to evaluate the user’s stress level in the game context and consequently to adapt the difficulty level of the game itself.

Once the data are collected, a user-profiling algorithm creates a personalized emotional profile of the player. The affective profile achieved can be used by any game-based system to create a game experience able to dynamically adapt the administered levels according to the changes in the player’s affective profile, so that the stress level can be kept within reasonable limits, improving learning abilities.
BFA qualifies itself as a versatile system that can be applied to different fields. Its target market is huge, including neuro-degenerative diseases, post-stroke rehabilitation, and learning disorders in pediatric age.