Interactive Story Box for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) tend to have difficulty in speech communication, geometric cognition, and motion control. They need to go through intensive rehabilitation exercises to develop and enhance their capabilities for daily living. The training aids or tools currently used cannot attract such a group of children to participate and persist in long-term exercise. This study aims to develop an Interactive Story Box to facilitate rehabilitation exercises of speech interaction, geometric cognition, and upper limb motion control under a playful and joyful rehabilitation environment. This box is designed to offer diverse geometric shape matching using puzzles with cartoon characteristics, and then a series of stories and speech interactions are generated based on the specific matching results. The multiple shapes of graphic puzzles, cartoon characters, intelligent voice synthesis, and audio-visual feedback are applied in this box design. Preliminary user testing in Suzhou BenQ Medical Center suggests that this box is warmly welcomed, easy to follow, manipulate and interact with, and children are better motivated to participate in the rehabilitation exercise.