DHBW Graduate Damian Sturm has recently won an iF Concept Design Award. With more than 12,000 submissions from 70 countries, the iF is among the world’s largest international junior competitions for young designers. Damian convinced the jury with his mixed media design thesis Richard Riese. It is a therapeutic video game concept based on LEAP Motion. It uses gestural interaction to help young patients regaining the fine-motor skills of their hands again.
In his research, Damian found out that one of the biggest challenges of medical therapies is patient compliance, ie consistently following medical advice. His approach: Therapy should not feel like a treatment, but as a game itself. Richard is a clumsy giant dwarf who must fulfill various coordination tasks. In helping Richard achieving his goals, therapeutic exercises on different levels and difficulty levels are completed. The success gets logged and visually prepared for therapist and patient. Design and interaction principles as well as an incentive game play are being applied to current consumer technology. The jury rewarded this approach with an iF Concept Design Award. The official award ceremony will take place in Hamburg in June. The thesis was supervised in the Department of Media Design by Prof. Klaus Birk, Martin Hesselmeier and Alexander Hanowski .
