Summer Research Opportunities

Project titles and description:

1. FluentTalk: NoPause – A Game-Based Approach to Reducing Stuttering

Description: FluentTalk is a therapeutic serious game designed to help users improve speech fluency and reduce stuttering, including interruptions, hesitations, and difficulty maintaining continuous conversation. The game immerses players in realistic, scenariobased dialogues where they practice turn-taking, response timing, and structured expression of ideas, while receiving real-time feedback on their performance. Through progressive challenges and adaptive difficulty, users learn to control pacing, minimize pauses, and build confidence in delivering smooth, coherent responses. By combining engaging gameplay with principles from communication training and speech therapy, FluentTalk provides an interactive and supportive environment that enables users to develop more natural, confident, and effective conversational skills in everyday situations.

2. Down’s Dream

Description: Down’s Dream is a VR serious game designed to help individuals with Down syndrome explore real-life jobs and independence skills in one integrated experience. Unlike existing games that focus on isolated skills, it combines education, social interaction, and career exploration, while also introducing uncommon job roles to broaden opportunities. The experience begins with personalized motivational messages from the user’s idols, followed by guided, interactive job simulations with visual and audio support. The game aims to fill the gap between current assistive tools and realworld vocational exposure by building confidence, independence, and allowing users to experience their dream careers.

3. The Haunted Diagnosis

Description: A Horror 3-Player VR-game, where players can either be Doctor, nurse, or patient. This game is close to “Escape the Room”, but the twist is that it’s more medicine driven. In this game there will be levels where the Doctor must find “clues” which are incomplete symptoms to diagnose the patient. On the other hand, the patient makes it harder for the Doctor to figure out the clues. Lastly, the nurse will try to sabotage both the patient and the doctor. The point of this game is to ensure that Doctors can find the hidden clues in a given amount of time and trust their intuition instead of being manipulated by the other characters.

4. Red Cross: VR Hospital

Description: The player is placed inside a busy hospital emergency unit with multiple patients all arriving at once. the player must inspect symptoms, choose the correct medical tools, and make fast decisions before the patient’s condition worsens. The game can include realistic environments like the ER, ICU, ambulances, or operating rooms. And all the cases would be realistic. The game uses VR so that players can interact with objects, look around, and make the game more realistic.