Tech4Good Research Lab

In collaboration with:

Sonora Institute of Technology (ITSON)
CEART DOWN
Down Obregon

Research Team

Veronica L. Amado Sánchez
Oscar I. Islas Cruz
Edgar A. Ahumada Solorza
Iván A. Encinas Monroy
Luis A. Castro
Karina Caro

A gesture-based video game to support eye-hand coordination and literacy skills of children with Down syndrome.

An overview of BeeSmart

Background

In 2017, four outstanding students started BeeSmart as a course project in the Designing interactive systems course of the Bachelor of Software Engineering in the Sonora Institute of Technology, where Dr. Caro was teaching the course. After concluding the course, the students decided to continue with the project and complete it through a professional internship program (2017 - 2018). After that, the project evolved into an undergraduate thesis and technological development (2018-2020). BeeSmart won first place in the Enactus contest in its regional phase; it was presented in various international forums such as Pervasive Health and Games and Learning Alliance conference. It was also presented at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and the therapists of Alenta Madrid validated it. The results of the long-term evaluation were published in an indexed Journal.

BeeSmart v1

Take a look to the first iteration of BeeSmart.

Research Team

See our research team working in the BeeSmart Project!

Impact

Currently, BeeSmart is used as a technological intervention at Down Obregon, a center that offers educational and therapeutic services to people with Down syndrome.

Publications

Amado-Sanchez, V. L., Islas-Cruz, O. I., Ahumada-Solorza, E. A., Encinas-Monroy, I. A., Caro, K., & Castro, L. A. (2017). BeeSmart: A Gesture-Based Videogame to Support Literacy and Eye-Hand Coordination of Children with Down Syndrome. In International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance (pp. 43-53). Springer, Cham.
Encinas-Monroy, I. A., Islas-Cruz, O. I., Amado-Sanchez, V. L., Ahumada-Solorza, E. A., Castro, L. A., & Caro, K. (2018). BeeSmart: A Videogame for Supporting Children with Down Syndrome in Eye-hand Coordination and Literacy Skills. In 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare–Demos, Posters, Doctoral Colloquium. European Alliance for Innovation (EAI).
Caro, K., Encinas-Monroy, I. A., Amado-Sanchez, V. L., Islas-Cruz, O. I., Ahumada-Solorza, E. A., & Castro, L. A. (2020). Using a Gesture-based videogame to support eye-hand coordination and pre-literacy skills of children with down syndrome. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 79(45), 34101-34128.