Subject

Cerebral visual impairment (CVI) is one of the most prominent causes of severe visual impairment in childhood and because visual impairments have a strong influence on development and functioning in everyday life, they are clinically very important. In CVI, the cause, location, and severity of brain lesions are different in each child, leading to the heterogeneous and complex clinical picture. Children with CVI experience problems in visual perception such as object and shape recognition, figure-ground perception, and spatial navigation. Our team has developed an individualized and adaptive game-based rehabilitation, training visuoperceptual skills for children with CVI aged 3-12 years.

In January 2022, we began our double-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) which aims to compare the effectiveness of playing with the adaptive versus non-adaptive version of the programme. This study is part of the iVision project and is done in collaboration with UZ Leuven, COS, and Centrum Ganspoel. In the RCT, children use the gamified rehabilitation program for three months, playing three times per week, for 20-25 minutes each training session.

We hypothesize that the effect of the visual training is influenced by the environment in which the children practice: If children with problems related to visual perception train in a room which is full of clutter, it might be too distracting for them. During the intervention period, we observe children playing the mini-games during three sessions and record data on the child’s visual fatigue, the amount of clutter present in the room, and take photos of the child’s play area.

Kind of work

This master thesis project aims to analyze how children’s visual fatigue relate to the clutter present in the room and how these variables affect a child’s gameplay performance. Clutter present in the room will be measured (1) subjectively (a) i.e., using the researcher’s observations filled out in a questionnaire, (b) distributing an online questionnaire to participants to rate the photos of the play area, and (2) objectively by computing different metrics that might be useful to quantify visual clutter. These metrics are based on state-of-the-art image processing techniques. Additionally, we expect the student to participate to the game play analysis and correlate the game play data, the observed clinical progress of the children and the observed visual clutter.

Framework of the Thesis

- Zhou, E. Y., Damiano, C., Wilder, J., & Walther, D. B. (2019). Measuring complexity of images using Multiscale Entropy. Journal of Vision, 19(10), 96a-96a.
- Rosenholtz, R., Li, Y., & Nakano, L. (2007). Measuring visual clutter. Journal of vision, 7(2), 17-1
- McDowell, N., & Budd, J. (2018). The perspectives of teachers and paraeducators on the relationship between classroom clutter and learning experiences for students with cerebral visual impairment. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 112(3), 248-260.
- https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Conversations+about+CVI+with+Matt+Tietjen+(TVI)/1_xxrbfgpe
- https://www.perkins.org/course/cvi-and-visual-fatigue/
- https://www.perkins.org/course/the-impact-of-clutter-on-children-with-cerebral-visual-impairment/

Number of Students

1