What the client says:

SPIKA have built an amazing new tool which will be used to assist therapeutic development within the NHS. Cognitive Remediation Therapy (CRT) is a psychological therapy which helps people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia to improve their memory, concentration and problem-solving skills. CIRCUITS is a new computerised CRT programme which has been designed by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, in collaboration with SPIKA.

The project came to light because there are very few computerised CRT programmes in existence, and those that do exist tend to be unsophisticated, unappealing to users and graphically uninteresting.

CIRCUITS on the other hand, is a highly interactive, intelligent and complex, yet user-friendly and graphically appealing tool which allows a therapist to tailor a therapy course to an individual patient as they work through the exercises. A therapist can regulate the difficulty levels of tasks and the system includes a feedback mechanism to store each individual patient's score on an ongoing basis.

CIRCUITS is a first in what has the potential to be a new wave of computerised tools to assist researchers and therapists and to improve the progress of and experience for patients within the NHS. CIRCUITS is currently being tested and further developed in research studies in the NHS.

        Dr C. Reeder

Highlights

This project has been implemented over 12 months, and proves that SPIKA is not only a backend software provider but is also able to produce state of the art graphical interactions and animations.

The software is based around a 3-dimensional modelled and animated navigation system presenting a fictive village. This village enables patients to zoom into different buildings for different types of tasks.

The extensive research statistics and management reporting track patient behaviour and performance improvements throughout a 40 week therapy program.

300 tasks of varying difficulty level, all designed to train the patient in real life scenarios.

Therapists and administrators can customize individual tasks or add new tasks using more than 200 parameter screens.

Artificial intelligence automatically adjusts the difficulty level for specific aspects of the therapy program.

Offline synchronisation enables patients to install the software on their home PCs without Internet access, and for therapists to transfer "homework" to the patients using memory sticks.

Easily adaptable to other countries (languages) and different types of therapy programs.

Consists of three different systems to cater for administrators, therapists and patients.

A special Therapist mode activates additional features in each task, such as drawing on the screen, printing, restarting, bypassing or repeating.

A help system containing over 100 context sensitive tutorials show the patient how to carry out the task and which strategies to use.

The tasks and concepts are based on scientifically proven research.

Technology

The village is modelled using Softimage XSI, the same 3D animation software used for film and TV productions, and the gaming industry.

All tasks are designed in Flash using a bespoke template engine to enable the tasks to be dynamically driven by parameters.

All business logic, artificial intelligence, performance tracking, offline synchronisation, configuration platform is written in JAVA6 and executed within a Tomcat Web container.

XML is used for communication between all components and between offline and online installations.

Database backend is designed for Oracle, MS/SQL, MySql and JavaDB.

A sub set of the full application can be distributed on CD as an off-the shelf program. It is packaged as a standard Windows program installer, and runs as a Swing application containing embedded browser, Jetty engine and JavaDB.

The software is platform independent, and runs equally well on Windows and Linux servers.