It is well known that exercises, questionnaires and measurements done at home with children with asthma contribute to effective therapy. Data analysis and early detection will not only reduce the costs of care but also the time you spend on often unexpected hospital visits in the evenings and weekends.
Very young children (from 3 years of age) do not understand what inhalation or expiration is, they are unable to control their respiratory muscles in such a way that good lung function measurement is possible. A diagnosis is then difficult, and they are not yet able to answer the questions in the questionnaires. Self-management and home monitoring is therefore not possible today.
To help 3 year old children with a lung disease such as asthma with self-management and home monitoring, Lung Games, together with the Sophia Children’s Hospital, parents and children with asthma, are developing a serious game that fits in perfectly with their perceptions and abilities. The objective of the game is to teach young children how to control their breathing while playing.
With Sparky you play instead of doing a boring training exercise. Research has shown that is really hard for lung specialists to train young children to this kind of training.
The Game Sparky makes this possible by gamification of the training. We use the games they play and love and make the training into an engaging and entertaining experience.
With specialized training methods created by the university hospital of Rotterdam (Erasmus UMC) we have gamified this into a program that results have shown really works! Patients after only 4 to 6 six weeks have shown able to blow a correct lung function measurement were before they were not able to.
In the current treatment for young children age 3 to 6 with lung problems there is no good treatment and diagnose possible. This because of the lack of lung function data. Learning to perform a lung function measurement requires good muscle control and understanding certain tasks… Currently mostly only done by older children.
Sparky make it possible for these young childeren to learn to complete a correct lung function measurement at a much younger age.
Every child is different. Therefor we have created a game treatment plan that is adaptable for each child. With a number of settings available in the physicians dashboard it is easy for a caregiver to change and adapt settings to each individual patient.
With a online dashboard which is connected with the game, the physician can see all lung related and progression data of each play session. Also game settings are available for the physician to make each unique child learn and game on the correct settings like learning curve, max number of levels, training intervals and much more.
The Sparky game is now also available to be played after the learning 4 to 6 weeks learning sessions, providing a vast insight in the treatment of a child. With trend information on LFT, peakflow , FVC, FFV1 FFV0,5 and other schematics and charts it will open doors for caregivers to give earlier treatment and better diagnoses to these young children.
Sparky has been developed together with the Erasmus UMC in the Netherlands, and has been tested in multiple hospitals like the UV Leuven Belgium, Sneider children hospital Isreal and others.
The most asked questions we have put together in the following section
How does the Sparky game work? What level do you have and how does the settings work? Find it all here!
How to install the game? This is a step to step installation guide to get you started
We have settings for the game and a Dashboard, so how to get started as a caregiver here