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Investigating Child-Game Interaction toward Improved Engagement in Serious Games for Speech Therapy

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Resumo:Speech therapy aims to help individuals improve their communication and speech skills, but the exercises can often feel repetitive and tiring for children. Serious Games, which are games developed with purposes beyond entertainment, can make these exercises more engaging and enjoyable. This dissertation looks at how the design of such games can be improved so that children stay motivated and participate more actively during therapy sessions. The work uses Fanima, a multi-platform prototype created to assess the pronunciation of European Portuguese phonemes, as a case study. By analysing literature, collecting feedback from Speech-Language Pathologists, and observing children’s interactions with the game through questionnaires and testing sessions, the study identifies which game elements help children stay engaged and which distract them from the tasks. Results showed that animated and interactive features captured children’s attention and improved motivation, while some visual elements caused distraction. Therapists valued the game as a useful complement to their practice but suggested improvements in personalization and feedback. The main contributions of this dissertation are an updated version of Fanima that better supports children’s engagement, a framework with design guidelines for future games, and insights into child–game interaction that can be useful for both researchers and practitioners. The testing is not yet complete, but the first results are promising and show potential for these games to support therapy in a meaningful way. Future work will continue with more testing involving a larger and more diverse group of children, further refine the guidelines, and explore new features for Fanima such as character selection and automatic speech recognition to allow more independent use. These steps can help strengthen the role of serious games in clinical practice.
Autores principais:Almeida, Mayra Alexandra Lopes Mendes
Assunto:Serious Games Speech Disorders Speech Therapy Interaction Design and Children Child-Computer Interaction Gamification
Ano:2025
País:Portugal
Tipo de documento:dissertação de mestrado
Tipo de acesso:acesso aberto
Instituição associada:Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Idioma:inglês
Origem:Repositório Institucional da UNL

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