The Neuro-grip Ball
Gamifying rehab assessment and progress evaluation
Created on 13th September 2025
•
The Neuro-grip Ball
Gamifying rehab assessment and progress evaluation
The problem The Neuro-grip Ball solves
We have aimed to create a device that turns neurological assessments into an interactive game.
The core idea is to fuse a clinical test with an interactive video game
to improve patient engagement and data quality.
Replace subjective, boring tests with an engaging, data
driven game.
A patient holds a sensor-equipped ball to control and play
an interactive wireless maze game.
• Outcome:
The system generates a precise, quantitative clinical
report for doctors that can even be shared remotely
Challenges we ran into
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FSR
Responsiveness Issue
At first, the force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) were too noisy and gave inconsistent grip readings. This made the grip meter in the game either freeze up or behave unpredictably. -
Fix:
I introduced a baseline calibration step at startup and applied a moving average filter to smooth out the raw values. This stabilized the grip strength and made it much more responsive. -
Unrealistic Ball Movement
Initially, the ball in the maze game just “slid” instantly instead of feeling like it was rolling. This killed the immersive experience. -
Fix:
I tweaked the physics engine by adding acceleration, friction, and inertia. Now, the ball eases into movement, slows down naturally, and feels much more like a real physical object.
Game & Hardware Syncing
- Integrating real-time ESP32 sensor data with pygame caused delays and jitter. Sometimes, the ball didn’t move even though data was streaming.
- Fix:
I implemented a non-blocking serial reader in Python and added a keyboard fallback for testing. This ensured smooth gameplay even if sensor data hiccupped.