ADHDev

Inspiration

ADHD diagnosis of children is very subjective; it relies on the perception of parents and teachers to be objective and encompassing. This lack of quantifiability places an even greater burden on doctors, who need to efficiently and confidently determine where a child falls on the ADHD spectrum in order to get them the help they need.

What it does

By creating a virtual environment where children are given a task and doctors are given the means to control distractions, the child can be directly evaluated by their doctor and, by assigning them a score based on how well they accomplished the task despite the distractions, the result is a value that can be compared to other patients.

How I built it

We made a classroom environment in Unity and animated 3D models of paper planes and crumpled paper balls that will enter the viewer's field of vision and potentially distract them from counting the letters that appear on the board at the front of the classroom. We used Java to code a program for doctors to input numerical values for how many distractions there were, how many letters the patient recorded correctly, and how many letters they were given. This yields a score that will believe will be significantly different for those who do and do not suffer from ADHD.

Challenges I ran into

Our group had minimal experience working Unity, so we had initial difficulties, particularly with looping animations, but we eventually this figured out. We also had a bit of trouble user-input animation triggering and the directions our added walls were facing (e.g. inverted, backward-facing; looked pretty funny).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud of learning Unity and setting up the Oculus Rift. It was incredibly exciting to work in virtual reality with such amazing technology.

What I learned

We learned an entirely new program and developed a finished product that does what we set out to do.

What's next for ADHDev

We need to test out our Hack with a pool of patients who have been diagnosed with ADHD and those who have not in order to determine base scores and set up a scale to compare. We would like to add more distractions of different types, such as birds flying past the window, a steadily ticking clock, and gradual changes in lighting in addition to our current spontaneous distractions, and we would like to integrate sound.