Context

This research project, led by LARIS in collaboration with LPPL and Angers University Hospital, aims to design and develop innovative digital tools that combine physical activity and cognitive stimulation in playful and evolving environments. These are intended for patients with Huntington’s disease ¹.

In the future, these tools could be adapted, used, and deployed for the care of patients with other neurodegenerative diseases or strokes.

Role and contributions

I contributed to the entire design of the application using Unity, integrating a pre-defined control scheme: a structured light camera (Orbec Astra, similar to Microsoft’s Kinect) to capture and recognize gestures for performing physical and cognitive exercises. A Bluetooth keypad is used to control the application without having to leave the camera’s field of view.

As an intern, I participated in the technical definition of the application and its prototyping.

Then, as a freelancer, I continued to iterate on the application while modularizing the code into several .NET assemblies to make it more robust and configurable, thus meeting evolving needs and preparing it for the clinical trial phase.

Responsabilities

• Technical definition
• Programming, testing & merge conflict resolution

Achievements

• Gesture-recognition module for Orbbec Astra
• Physical, cognitive, and synergistic exercise modules
• Asset serialization and management for the exercises
  • Editor tools to facilitate their creation and/or modification by other contributors in the project.
• Programming for data capture and recording during experiments
• User Interface

Technologies

Hardware : Orbbec Astra
Programming : C#, .NET
Game Engine : Unity 2020
Librairies : Astra SDK Package for Unity (modified for the project’s needs)
Version Control : Git