For leading a healthy life, regular breathing exercises can be beneficial. We developed Life Tree, a virtual reality game in which the player controls the growth of a virtual tree by practicing the pursed-lip breathing technique. We chose VR because it allows to focus on the virtual environment and limit external distractions, which is beneficial for breathing exercises. We used a qualitative analysis of the use of Life Tree to articulate a set of breathing exercise game design strategies that game designers can use when aiming to develop engaging breathing exercise games.

Publications

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games. Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY 2017. Long paper. ACM. 19-31.

Mueller, F., Byrne, R., Andres, J., Patibanda, R. Experiencing the Body as Play. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI 2018. Long paper. ACM. Talk videoBEST PAPER AWARD (top 1%).

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. BreathSenses: Towards Understanding Breathing Games. CHI 2016. Submission to the “Pervasive Play” Workshop.

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. BreathSenses: Towards Understanding Breathing Games. CHI 2016. Submission to the “Touch, Taste, & Smell User Interfaces: The Future of Multisensory HCI” Workshop.

Thesis

Patibanda, R. 2017. Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games