Poconostics

Target Audience: General Audience

Company: BlueHalo

Descriptions: Poconostics consists of two games for balance training: Tilted Dungeon and Food Frenzy. Tilted Dungeon is a VR, sway-controlled, puzzle game and Food Frenzy is a VR, head-and-eye controlled shooting game. Both provide a platform for users to engage patients in physical therapy and rehabilitation programs, while gathering objective data that therapists can use to evaluate patients’ progress.

Skills and Ideas Taught: Food Frenzy and Tilted Dungeon elicit posture, balance control, and head/eye coordination synchronization and divergence techniques that are part of physical rehabilitation therapy.

Goals: The goal of the games are to use the body, head, and eyes to control characters in two games. Tilted Dungeon requires the player to sway their body to navigate a character through a maze, while Food Frenzy requires the player to use their head and eyes to target flying food elements and shoot them from the air. The therapist interface provides controls to configure the game (e.g., head or eye as targeting method) and shows traces of the player’s eye gaze and head orientation. These traces are useful to see the pattern of the patient’s eyes and head and to detect instabilities.

Primary Audience: Adults with mild traumatic brain injury, including soldiers

Assessment Approach: Scores are based on the player’s ability to control their body as directed. Time-to-complete, actions-per-second, and accuracy of targeting all factor into scoring calculations.

Game Engine: Unity

Operating System: Windows 10