With our ageing population becoming ever larger, progressive neurological conditions that affect the brain (neurodegenerative diseases) are going to become an increasing challenge for clinicians and society. These neurodegenerative diseases have a variety of presentations and often encompass physical, cognitive and psychiatric symptoms.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common of these conditions, affecting 1 in 1000 people over the age of 65. It is characterised by physical symptoms but is also known to significantly affect memory and mood. One of the striking features of the disease is its impact on walking, or gait. Patients are slow and shuffling and may also experience a particular symptom known as Freezing of Gait, where they become unable to walk for no apparent reason. This symptom is highly disabling and also increases the risk of falling with subsequent injury in those individuals it affects.
Using the Virtual Gait Laboratory we are attempting to understand the cause for these symptoms of Freezing, which we hope will lead to clinical advances that will benefit patients and 'Defrost Parkinson's Disease'.
The research is being conducted by Dr Simon Lewis of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (Sydney, Australia).
The technologies used for creation of the virtual environment are:
For full information on this project click here.
This project is a modification (mod) of the game Doom 3 from id Software.
During development of Doom 3 it had always been stated that the focus would be on single player game play. Relatively late on in the project, however, multiplayer online and LAN play was included.
While the underlying networking implementation was robust there were several flaws in the actual game play and very few of the features were available that online players now take for granted in a multiplayer title. Some of the flaws were addressed in subsequent patch releases but no significant changes to the basic features were made.
The Enhanced Militarized Zone (EMZ) was created to add the "missing" features and fix as many of the remaining faults as possible. Its development was guided by the needs of the online Doom 3 community and the desire to experiment with the technologies provided by the Doom 3 engine (idTech4).
The technologies used in EMZ development are as follows:
For full information on EMZ visit the website.
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