Game for Parkinson Voice Training

The basic idea of our game is to help people with e.g. Parkinson desease by means of training them to speak louder. According to our experiences quite a lot of the Parkinson patients do not speak with sufficient loudness even if they think they do. Thus, this little game should help them to overcome that problem.

 

Some Hints How to Start/Play the Game

After starting the game, click on the left menu bar the button "Load". By the way, the guy on the picture is Nico Simoski. He programmed the game in his bachelor thesis and refined it afterwards as a so-called "Hiwi" student. Christin Baasch and Finn Spitz (both are/were Ph.D. students in the DSS team) supervised the work.

Maybe first some historic background: According to Wikipedia such types of puzzles were invented by the american postman Noyes Palmer Chapman in the year 1874. He showed a plate with 15 cubes with numbers from 1 to 15 on it to his friends, called it a magic square, and asked them to reorder it. A few years later the game came on the market as a so-called "Gem Puzzle".
 

When the picture selection menu appears, select a picture of your choice. We automatically scale down pictures that are too large, but we keep very small pictures as they are. Typical photos - as taken by a smartphone or a "normal" camera - are fine for the game.

After clicking "open" the selected picture will be visible on your screen. Take a moment and have a look on it. Soon it will be scrambled and it will be your job to reorder it.
 

Now you can directly play the game. To do so, klick on the start button in the left menu bar. The game will split your picture into nine pieces (three by three) and removes one of them. If you would like to have a more complicated game, go for the the "three by four", "four by three", or even "four by four" level. However, for a start we recommend to stay with nine pieces.

Next the game will automatically randomize the position of the individual cubes. Your job is it now to reorder the cubes and you should do this by your own voice.

If you would like, for example, to move the cube below the missing one in the middle upwards, you have to say a "U" for a certain duration and with a certain loudness. The correct loudness is indicated by the "power bar" depicted below the picture. Here you should try to stay in the green area. If you hold the "U" long enough the cube will move.
 

If you would like to move another cube, just check the letter in the cube of your choice and speak it. If you finally reorder the entire picture the game is beaten. You will see how long it took and how many moves you required.

And now ...

... have fun with our game. It can be downloaded here.