Kinect-Based Art System Improves Disabled Children's Motor Skills

Remember when dial-up was so slow, you’d forgo the internet and spend hours after school playing Minesweeper or doodling on Microsoft Paint? The digital paintings above and below might harken back to the art you made during those afternoons in your parents’ basement, but they weren’t made with a click of a mouse. Instead they’re the result of a wave of the hand, and were made by disabled children using a Kinect-based virtual art system written with C++.

All artwork made by disabled children using a Kinect program during a clinical trial.

Kinect’s motion sensing capabilities have sparked a range of digital painting programs in recent years, from stylized high-profile interactive museum installations like Paik Times Five and Cloud Pink, to simplistic applications like Kinect Paint and Point 2 Paint designed to give a mess-free finger-painting experience. Just a few weeks ago Corel unveiled Painter Freestyle, a program using the Kinect-like Leap Motion Controller that brings air painting to lap and desktops. But the particular program that the images in this post were made with is unique in its aim to provide therapeutic recreation to children with disabilities.

The Kinect Virtual Art Program was designed as part of a clinical trial for disabled children aged five to ten years, conducted by Flinders University in Australia and Holland Bloorview Rehabilitation Hospital in Canada. The researchers wanted to use the Kinect’s motion technology to advance art therapy techniques, believing that artistic expression is a valuable social and emotional outlet that can develop communication skills and creativity, as well as provide physical benefits like improved motor control. Over the course of the study, 80 percent of participants experienced increased movement and enjoyment.

The Kinect removes a barrier to engagement that kids with a range of disabilities seem to take to. Parents of disabled children have noted that games marketed at the general public, like the workout game Your Shape, are being used by this special interest demographic. The study demonstrates there’s a demand for Kinect-based software designed for therapeutic use, but currently there are no commercial products like this available.

The Kinect Virtual Art Program was designed just for the purposes of the trial and you can see from the artwork, the results are quite simplistic. But the simplistic design is what gives the artwork an aesthetic that recalls an earlier computer age. And it’s one that internet artists are often trying to capture in their ironically faux-naive digital paintings. But as much as these artists might try to capture the magic of that first interaction, the vibrant artworks from the clinical trial show that there’s nothing quite like the real thing.