Jecripe: how a serious game project encouraged studies in different computer science areas

Serious game projects require multidisciplinary professionals, including programmers, designers and game designers. In games for health, one more type of professional must be included which is the one with health knowledge. The Jecripe Project has the aim of developing serious games for people with special needs. The professionals from health science are speech therapists and more professionals have the intention to be part of the mentioned project. However, this work presents how a serious game project motivated studies in different Computer Science research areas. We describe the three main studies in the Jecripe Project, each of one in a different area: Computer Vision, Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction. The intention of the continuation in the project is to perform more studies including the integration of natural user interfaces in games for people with special needs.