4/25 – Vesna Novak, University of Cincinnati
Biomedical Engineering Seminar
April 25, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
BME Seminar in SEO 236
Address
851 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileSpeaker:
Vesna Novak, Ph.D.
Graduate Program Director, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (primary appointment)
Associate Professor in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering (secondary appointments)
University of Cincinnati
Title: Serious games for motor rehabilitation and transgender voice training
Abstract: Serious games are games meant for practical benefits rather than entertainment and can help people develop many useful skills. They do this by both providing useful guidance and motivating users to engage with them frequently and intensively. In this presentation, I will discuss two applications of serious games. First, I will discuss serious games for motor rehabilitation, where patients need to exercise frequently and intensely to regain their movement abilities after neurological injury, but often lack motivation to do so. Motivation can be increased using games that engage patients with a variety of features: for example, guidance delivered by robots, intelligent difficulty adaptation, and the ability to exercise together with other patients or loved ones. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how similar serious game design principles can be applied to a different application: training transgender people how to modify their voice to better match their gender identity. Serious games for such voice training are in high demand among potential end-users and rely heavily on visual feedback about the user’s voice, but suffer from very different challenges from rehabilitation games: for example, they must be delivered completely over the Internet, avoid playing the user’s voice back to them, and present complex speech information such as formant frequencies in an easy-to-understand manner.
Date posted
Jan 24, 2025
Date updated
Feb 22, 2025