Browsing by Author "Tabor, Aaron"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Designing breathing exercise technologies for health and wellness
    (University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Tabor, Aaron; Bateman, Scott; Scheme, Erik
    This doctoral research identifies design guidelines that can improve breathing exercise technologies – guidance and feedback systems that support breathing exercises. Specifically, the research demonstrates that two commonly employed Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design approaches for increasing user engagement (i.e., serious games) and decreasing attentional demand (i.e., peripheral information systems) can be used to promote breathing exercise technologies in a way that preserves exercise integrity and benefit. This is important because breathing exercises have a wide range of health and wellness benefits, and our designs may allow these benefits to be attained more fully and by a wider audience. Further, the research also contributes novel design artifacts and insights that will support the ongoing exploration of breathing exercise technologies. The findings may generalize to other design-focused research applications such as interventions for health and wellness, serious games for rehabilitation, and peripheral and ambient information systems.
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    Evaluation of myoelectric control learning using multi-session game-based training
    (IEEE, 2018-07-12) Tabor, Aaron; Bateman, Scott; Scheme, Erik
    While training is critical for ensuring initial success as well as continued adoption of a myoelectric powered prosthesis, relatively little is known about the amount of training that is necessary. In previous studies, participants have completed only a small number of sessions, leaving doubt about whether the findings necessarily generalize to a longer-term clinical training program. Furthermore, a heavy emphasis has been placed on a functional prosthesis use when assessing the effectiveness of myoelectric training. Although well-motivated, this all-inclusive approach may obscure more subtle improvements made in underlying muscle control that could lead to tangible benefits. In this paper, a deeper exploration of the effects of myoelectric training was performed by following the progress of 30 participants as they completed a series of ten 30-min training sessions over multiple days. The progress was assessed using a newly developed set of metrics that was specifically designed to quantify the aspects of muscle control that are foundational to the strong myoelectric prosthesis use. It was determined that, while myoelectric training can lead to improvements in muscle control, these improvements may take longer than previously considered, even occurring after improvements in the training game itself. These results suggest the need to reconsider how and when transfer from training activities is assessed.
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    Game-based myoelectric muscle training
    (University of New Brunswick, 2017) Tabor, Aaron; Bateman, Scott; Scheme, Erik
    For new myoelectric prosthesis users, muscle training is a critical step that promotes effective use and long-term adoption of the prosthesis. Training, however, currently has several problems: 1) existing approaches require expensive tools and clinical expertise, restricting their use to the clinical environment, 2) exercises are boring, repetitive, and uninformative, making it difficult for patients to stay motivated, 3) assessment tools focus exclusively on improvements in functional, real-world prosthesis tasks, which conflicts with other therapeutic goals in early training, and 4) little is known about the effects of longer-term training because existing studies have subjected participants to a very short series of training sessions. While myoelectric training games have been proposed to create a more motivating training environment, commercially available games still exhibit many of these issues. Furthermore, current research presents inconsistent findings and conflicting results, making it unclear whether games hold therapeutic value. This research demonstrates that training games can be designed to address these issues by developing a low-cost, easy-to-use training game that targets the therapeutic goals of myoelectric training. Guidelines for promoting a fun, engaging, and informative training experience were identified by engaging prosthesis users and clinical experts throughout the design of a myoelectric training game. Furthermore, a newly developed set of metrics was used to demonstrate improvement in participants’ underlying muscle control throughout a series of game-based training sessions, further suggesting that games can be designed to provide therapeutic value. This work introduces an open-source training game, demonstrates the therapeutic value of games for myoelectric training, and presents insight that will be applicable to both future research on myoelectric training as well as aspects of training in clinical practice.