Using Mobile Serious Games in the Context of Chronic Disorders - A Mobile Game Concept for the Treatment of Tinnitus

Schickler, Marc and Pryss, Rüdiger and Reichert, Manfred and Schobel, Johannes and Langguth, Berthold and Schlee, Winfried (2016) Using Mobile Serious Games in the Context of Chronic Disorders - A Mobile Game Concept for the Treatment of Tinnitus. In: 29th IEEE Int'l Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2016), 20 - 23 June 2016, Belfast.

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Abstract

Tinnitus (“ringing in the ear”) is characterized by the perception of a sound in the absence of a corresponding acoustic stimulus. While many affected people habituate to the phantom sound, others are severely bothered and impaired in their quality of life. It is assumed that the latter group is characterized by a deficient noise cancelling mechanism in the brain. To train tinnitus patients to focus on target sounds and hence to suppress irrelevant background sounds, we developed a mobile serious game application, which is presented in this paper. The application runs on three mobile operating systems. We describe its goals and architecture as well as results from an evaluation study. Study results indicate that the gaming approach is feasible for training affected patients in focusing on directional hearing and, thereby, to suppress their tinnitus. Compared to traditional hearing training, advances of this approach are anytime availability, higher enjoyment, immediate feedback, and the option to stepwise increase game difficulty. From this, we expected an increased patient motivation and adherence as well as improved training and learning effects.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects: DBIS Research > Publications
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science > Institute of Databases and Informations Systems > DBIS Research and Teaching > DBIS Research > Publications
Depositing User: Herr Marc Schickler
Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2016 17:04
Last Modified: 16 Sep 2016 06:41
URI: http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/id/eprint/1372

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