Students Win CIMIT Prize

Po’s team shares third place with a group from University of California, Berkeley in the CIMIT Prize competition, which recognizes student research that uses novel technology to address major diagnostic and therapeutic challenges in primary health care. Team leader Po says his group is in the development phase of the project, titled “Developing and Testing a Novel Therapeutic Game for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

 

Po says the prize money will be used to fund the ongoing project. The team’s mentor is Andrew Laine, professor and vice-chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. The team is being advised by Dr. Andrew Gerber MD PhD, Dr. Bradley S. Peterson MD, and Dr. Johanna Lantz PhD from CUMC and Gary Molenaar (Director of Instruction, Bergen County Special Services) and Howard Lerner EdD (assistant superintendent Bergen County Technical Schools). 

 

Team members include Columbia’s Brenda Chen PhD’12 Biomedical Engineering and George Xu MS’06 Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech’s Risa Lin PhD’11 Biomedical Engineering, Chirag Patel ’12 MD/PhD Neuroscience at University of Texas at Houston, Lisa Allen MA’10 Animation and Visual Effects at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and Jeremy Awon BS’07 Computer Science from Cornell University.

Autism spectrum disorder is the fastest-growing developmental disability in the country, according to the project abstract. Treatment can often be prohibitively expensive, requiring frequent visits to care facilities. 

“To address this, we have been working in close collaboration with clinicians, researchers, and other Autism professionals at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Medical Center and Bergen County Special Services to develop a series of therapeutic computer games for autistic children between the age of 5 and 18,” Po says. “These games will help supplement existing treatment plans by providing a high level of individualized care outside of the treatment facility while encouraging patients to improve targeted skills through practice.” 

Key components of the game are designed to provide feedback and customizable features, says Chen, to tailor the game to the child’s specific needs.

“Basically, by using our game, parents and therapist will be able to monitor a child's progress through recorded in-game behavior and metrics (score, time, mouse tracking),” she says. “Based on this feedback, they will be able to assess the appropriateness of the game for that specific child and customize aspects of the game to suit their individual needs. The idea is to provide a novel therapeutic gaming framework that will help therapists help their patients, even when they are not in the treatment facility.”