Paper: Serious Games for Rehabilitation A Survey and a Classification Towards a Taxonomy

Rego, P.; Moreira, P.M.; Reis, L.P., "Serious games for rehabilitation: A survey and a classification towards a taxonomy," Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), 2010 5th Iberian Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,6, 16-19 June 2010


This paper presents fundamental concepts relating to Serious Games followed by a survey of relevant work and applications on Serious Games for Rehabilitation.

As a reference, they  adopted the RehaCom System (see example link). This is a serious game application widely used for cognitive rehabilitation and well grounded in neuro-scientific theory.

Based on the literature reviewed they identify as important main criteria for the classification of Serious games in the rehabilitation area the following ones:

     * Application area
     * Interaction Technology
     * Game interface
     * Number of players
     * Adaptability
     * Performance Feedback
     * Progress monitoring
     * Game portability


Next table displays the classification.

Example:
http://anatomicalconcepts.com/index.php/products/gloreha-hand-rehabilitation#

Paper: Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games

Hocine, N.; Gouaich, A.; Di Loreto, I.; Joab, M., "Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games," Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2011 IEEE 1st International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,8, 16-18 Nov. 2011

This paper presents presents a difficulty adaptation technique dedicated to a family of therapeutic games for post-stroke rehabilitation based on therapeutic serious game, they focus in upper limb rehabilitation.

As introduction they talk about studies that suggest intensive training (many repetitions) while giving feedbacks and motivating the patients can have an important impact on the patients’ skills recover.  And a person who enjoys what he is doing spends more time developing his skills in a given activity.

They developed a game that is based on the Wii-balance from Nintendo. This game aims to improve player’s equilibrium capabilities while achieving the game goals.

Paper: Augmented Reality Games for Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Burke, J. W.; McNeill, M. D J; Charles, D.K.; Morrow, P.J.; Crosbie, J.H.; McDonough, S.M., "Augmented Reality Games for Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation," Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES), 2010 Second International Conference on , vol., no., pp.75,78, 25-26 March 2010

In this paper they present some serious games that use augmented reality for upper limb stroke rehabilitation.

Demos:

- It is interesting how they adapt the game depending on the initial calibration results.

- I like the idea of the game but not the AR markers they have to use.
- I don't like that this AR game doesn't adapt to the environment

They  identified three aspects of game design which are important for the user experience in a rehabilitation game:
* meaningful play
* challenge
* conservative handling of failure