John Schmitz Vist 405: September 2015

I will be working with Andrew on a 3D, possibly virtual, pulmonary function testing environment. I copied his write up for the idea below. He proposed the idea to me last night and I decided that the idea seemed really solid, so Andrew and I decided to morph our original idea into this:

Background Concept:

Growing up with chronic lung disease, I had to undergo pulmonary function tests often to check the progression of my illness. Many children with asthma or other lung issues have to perform these tests. The tests occasionally are equipped with a small animation that appears as if it was created in the mid 1990s in Microsoft Paint to help incentivize children to perform them (ex. “balloons” or “candles”). The tests have long passed their effectiveness, however, and need a massive update. What may have worked in the past no longer does. My mom, who is a pediatric physician, faces this issue regularly; children are reluctant to perform reliable respiratory tests.

I aim to create a more realistic, immersive environment for children to help incentivize them to provide more reliable statistics and be more willing to do them period. In addition, I hope to gamify the system to act as a form of respiratory “training” or “therapy” to help produce greater results over time for all ages of patients.

Summary of Research:

The first link is not an academic article, however it is website that focuses on the wellness and health of children. It gives an overview of how pulmonary function tests (PFT) are performed and operate, the challenges involved and what happens after the tests. Aside from the information that it provides on the process itself, it makes note that children are often not willing to put forth the effort to produce reliable, consistent results. The second link discusses a study that was performed among roughly 100 children that found that children that used animations still had less consistent results over long periods of time. The article makes it seem that it is the interactive game’s fault for the results, however in the third link, another study was performed that showed how universally the performance often progresses past what is accountable for unknown reasons. This suggests that it is not the animations fault, but something completely irrelevant to the first study, and it is only natural to have diminishing performance tests over time. The last link explains the results of another study that involved two separate group of adults. One group did not do anything different than their standard PFTs, while the other group used a game to help “train” for PFTs. The group that used the game far outperformed the other group that only did PFTs. This gives the notion that interactive visualization actually promotes the improvement of lung capacity and function among patients.

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