LIMBITLESS SOLUTIONS

From Limbitless Solution's website - 

"We are Limbitless Solutions, Inc., an organization at the University of Central Florida. We specialize in creating and donating personalized 3D-printed, EMG-powered prosthetics and other accessibility tech for children and adults"

My role on the Limbitless team was in the Game Design Team. Where we worked to make training games which utilized the EMG technology as a controller in order to help teach the users how to control their bionic arm. I was employed at Limbitless Solutions as an Associate Scholar for a year, and achieved a lot during my time there. Including implementing numerous features into existing titles, being the lead programmer on a new title, and even having my research turned into a paper and published in a journal. The following sections will describe some of the games I worked on and my roles and responsibilities within those projects.

SUPER BIONIC BASH

Project Description

Super Bionic Bash is a Mario-Party styled game, developed in Unreal, that I was the lead developer on for its early stages. The game aimed to utilize EMG flex based controllers, in minigame environments to help train users to better control their bionic arms.

Features

• Board Movement. In a party style game the player rolls a dice, in our case two dices, and the number is taken, and the player proceeds through the board that many spaces.

• Minigames, at the end of each players turn the game transitions into a random minigame. The minigames I designed were created with flex controls in mind, and games like races, with the flex as an analog throttle input, could be mapped to a trigger on a traditional controller, for players not using the flex controller as an input.

• EMG Controllers. I was responsible for implementing the ability to connect our custom EMG controllers to the Unreal Engine on an Android device. The controllers use Bluetooth LE to connect to a device, so I wrote some classes to handle interfacing that connection between the device and the game. 

• Controller calibration, with the values of the controller able to be read from the device, I created a calibration system, that auto adjusts the thresholds of the flex values from the device.

• Controller assignment system. When a flex controller connects to the game, it sends a characteristic back which assigns that controller to a color. Players can set their flex controller setting to that color, and the input between the two will be paired. No two players can use the same colored flex controller.

LIMBITLESS RUNNER

Project Description

Help Ashley the Engineer as she runs though the Limbitless prosthetic factory. Help her collect the lost stars and avoid mayhem like mechanical arms, moving packages, and more. The game is also integrated with the Limbitless EMG game controller to help bionic kids learn how to use their prosthetic arms. 

Link to Play

Link To Research Paper (Explained Below)

My Roles

My time working on Limbitless Runner consisted of 3 main tasks : 

• Integration of Machine Learning Agents to play a challenge mode within the game.

  • I was responsible for the entire process of creating these AI Agents, from building the level which allowed us to train the agents, to adjusting the parameters and providing inputs to allow the agents to actually improve in the game

  • The idea behind implementing this was broken down into two ideas

    • If we were able to train an agent to theoretical perfection, we would be better able to balance the game, since if a jump was impossible for an AI it would be impossible for a player, and the goal of this game was to minimize frustrations as players get used to their new arm,  so an impossible jump would have been disasterous

    • We also wanted to compare the training speed of a AI agent, vs the training speed of a human both playing the challenge mode starting from no experience. My research was used in a paper which can be found here

• Implementation of new characters, as well as a reworked shop in the menu to account for this.

  • During my time there new models were being made for the character. Me and a coworker were assigned to get these models, into the game, and also create a system where the players can unlock these new characters via a shop. I was mainly responsible for the creation of the shop menu.

• Bug fixes pertaining to powerups in the game, and issues pertaining to the main menu

LIMBITLESS JOURNEY

Project Description

Winner of Best Student Developed Game at I/ITSEC Serious Games Showcase 2023

A training simulation game used to help patients with ALS control a hands-free wheelchair. 

Features

• EMG Toggle based movement. The player controls the character via flexes in the temporalis muscle. A 100% flex goes forward, and 50% goes left, and 75% goes right.

• Threshold customization, the values above are not set, and the user can adjust these values however they need.

• Eye tracking menus, as this game is designed for patients with ALS all the menus can be controlled via eye-tracking

• Training based environments, the game is meant to teach this method of controlling a hands-free wheelchair and as such the levels are simple, and build up in difficulties meant to build up the users skills alongside them.

• Custom Characters, users can have some level of self expression by choosing their own character to use in the game.

My Role

I was responsible for implementing feedback from patients in our clinical trial testing the game. Some of the features I worked on includes, an eye-tracking speed adjuster, a flex to select system, so the patients wouldn't have to wait for the eye tracking selector to finish every time, a cursor for the eye tracking, and various improvements to other areas of the game, like pausing when looking at a button for better ease of use. I also handled the demoing of this game as various events.