BrainTap, Gaming With Arthritis In Mind

As a final project in their 3rd year of the University of Technology Sydney, [James] and a few classmates put together this interesting game. Called BrainTap, it is described as a game targeted at the baby boomers focusing on fine motor skills and memory.

The game plays similar to the common game “simon”. The box lights up a series of LEDs in a pattern, then you have to repeat the pattern back with the corresponding buttons in the glove. There is vibration feedback in the glove as well as the lights and sounds you see in the video. Though they do mention arthritis in their title, we don’t think our grandmas with arthritis would enjoy those hand motions much. We, however, might spend hours doing this instead of more important things.

We particularly like the visual construction of the game box. The case was designed in CAD, 3d printed, then sanded smooth and painted with automotive paint to get that perfect finish. Great job guys.

3 thoughts on “BrainTap, Gaming With Arthritis In Mind

  1. “Baby boomers”? The oldest of us are 64, and the youngest are 45-50 depending on where you feel like putting the boundary between us and GenX. Maybe our parents can use this sort of thing, but if you tell us we’ve got memory problems we’ll tell you to get off our lawns before we wave our hands at the Kinect user interface for our Arduino-controlled lawn sprinklers. (That or blame it on all the drugs we mostly didn’t use during the 60s..) It looks like a Simon game, and we remember playing the original large plastic toy.

  2. Rehab device for people who have had hand or forearm surgery.

    Surprising they built it with a left hand glove. Most hand things like VR gloves and the Nintendo Power Glove have only been made in right hand versions.

  3. Cool, didn’t know someone posted about our project on hackaday too! Love coming here to seeing cool stuff, didn’t think I’d have a project posted here.

    @Bill, yeah that was just the brief. We know that a lot of baby boomers may not have issues with memory and arthritis, but there certainly are a lot that do (my parents spring to mind, they’re in their early 50’s)

    @Galane, you’re right we did decide between left and right handed versions, I think we just went with what resources we had to be honest (under a limited time frame, the whole project was completed in a few weeks or so) One of the questions posed to us in the presentation was whether we’d considered use of an ambidextrous glove, to which we had, but was unable to find a glove suitable that would accomodate for this.

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