Assignment

Company

I'm doing an internship at the Technical University of Eindhoven where I'm working on an educational health game called "SugarVita". The game is designed for patients with diabetes to help them learn more about diabetes and maintain a healthier lifestyle. SugarVita is a product created by TU/e for HRH Diabetes Games as partners of the "Máxima Medisch Centrum". TU/e also owns a social health platform called GameBus. This platform will be implemented in SugarVita to enhance the personalisation of SugarVita for players with a GameBus account.

Starting Point

As it stands, the project was initially being worked on by a professional game studio. When the studio dropped the project, some other intern worked on it for half a year. As it stands right now, the project is in a pretty complete prototype stage where most of the features are implemented into the game. 

Expected End Product

During my internship, the goal of my assignment within the project of SugarVita is to improve the social aspect of the game by adding new features. One of the features I will be working on is allowing the player to record their play-throughs and share them with friends on GameBus. The end product of my internship should allow players to share SugarVita experiences through GameBus to improve on the social aspect of the game. At the same time, the game (code) itself needs to be more sustainable and expandable.

Target Audience

Our target audience are patients with diabetes disease where we focus on elderly people because they are most likely to suffer from diabetes. The goal is for doctors to be able to recommend this app to their (new) patients to learn about the disease and learn how to maintain a healthy lifestyle without having to research diabetes on the internet reading endless forums and blogs. SugarVita should be a playful way to learn about diabetes.

Stakeholders

• Danilo Ferreira de Carvalho is the person I work closest with besides Jasper. He is a MSc in Computer Engineering and is now a PhD Candidate. He doesn't work on the game itself, but he knows mostly how it is structured and always knows what I'm working on. 
  
• Harm Haak is one of the stakeholders and simultaneously the owner of SugarVita. He is an internist at MMC Eindhoven who focusses on endocrinology. With this he has frequent contact with people suffering from diabetes and wanting to help these patients, he partnered with TU/e to start the development of SugarVita. He doesn't know a lot about the technical details, but he does know what the game is supposed to bring forth in diabetes patients and with that he has valuable input when it comes to early concepting and diabetes knowledge.
• Pieter Van Gorp is an associate professor at the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the other product owner of SugarVita. He works at the Information Systems lab, with a primary focus on digital health tools. "My aim is to put citizens in charge of their personal health data." (source). This quote shows his priorities and he wants SugarVita to help with this as well. He manages data and works together with us to create a very accurate game with easy data to read for the player.
• Natal van Riel is Professor of Biomedical Systems Biology at the department of Biomedical Engineering (research group Computational Biology) at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he leads the Systems Biology and Metabolic Diseases research program. He is also part-time Professor of Computational Modelling at Amsterdam University Medical Centers (location AMC, University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Medicine). Natal is yet another project owner.
• Daan van Eijl is a student at Fontys University of Applied Science and also an intern at TU/e. We work closely together on SugarVita.