Game-abling: Platform of Games for People with Cerebral Palsy to Enhance Living Adjusment

Research Project FP7-SME-2012, Grant agreement no: 315032 (2012-2014)

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is one of the most frequently conditions in childhood, with an itcidence of 2 pe 1,000 live births. In the EU there is 1.3 out of 15 million persons with CP in the world. This neurological disorder affects body movement, balance and posture and almost always is accompanied by other cognitive or sensory impairments like mental retardation, deafness and vision problems. The severity of these problems varies widely, from very mild and subtle to very profound.

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These disabilities lead to an inactive lifestyle which reduces the patient’s physical health, social participation, and quality of life. Therapy costs can be up to €45,000 by year, a cost that cannot be afforded by most of the families. Playing Video games is a useful treatment that promotes and maintains more active and healthful lifestyle in these persons. This in turn contributes to reduce medical and social care cost and improve well-being of their families. However accessibility to videogames is hardly applied for them.

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GAME-ABLING is to create a softwarg tool for creatine interactive video games in an innuitive manner in such a way that non-expert personnel (e.g. parents) can develop customized games. Games will be controlled using body movements and voice. To this end, Computer Vision and image processing techniques will be developed to improve accessibility.

GAME-ABLING will create a web portal to make up a disabled gaming e-communityrin where users will have access to use the software tool, play games and upload own creations to share it. SMEs envisage GAME-ABLING exploitation following a subscription business model to have full access to the web portal. GAME-ABLING represents a business opportunity for the SMEs, who expect to reach 0.5% world market penetration and an accumulated income of €9.9 million in 5 years. In addition, GAME-ABLING will contribute to reduce medical and social care costs in the EU by at least 0.5% which supposes additional annual savings of €200 million.

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