Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Serious Games for Cerebral Visual Impairment

Abstract

Cerebral visual impairment (CVI) is the leading cause of visual impairment in developed countries. No treatment for CVI exists and children need long-term individualized therapy. The use of serious games in therapy for children with visual impairment has the potential to be beneficial, however, integrating personalization and adaptivity in game-based rehabilitation is crucial. There are very few serious games designed for children with CVI and to author's knowledge none of them implements dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). We designed and implemented serious games for high-level visuoperceptual skills (e.g., object recognition, figure ground perception, etc.) training. Moreover, the games have DDA implemented using a reinforcement learning algorithm to adjust the game difficulty based on the child's in-game performance. Currently, a doubleblind Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) is running, where children with CVI play our serious games. The aim of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an adaptive therapy approach for children with CVI.