Serious Games and Rehabilitation for Elderly Adults (original) (raw)
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Creation of Physiatric Exercises for Remote Use in Rehabilitation Exergames
2018
The current demographic ageing in Europe is the result of a relevant economic, social, and medical development. Nevertheless, at the same time, it is also leading to a significant increase in the demand for long-term care (LTC), especially for seniors. One viable way to offer qualified cares at home, while at the same time containing costs, is to exploit digital technologies as enablers of a constant interaction between seniors and assisting personnel. In particular, (video) games have already been identified as a viable way to foster motivation and engagement in the long term. While technical solutions to provide at home LTC has already been proposed, the scientific community is still working on general methodologies to streamline the process on the caretaker’s side. In this paper, we focus on a software application to design and propose physiatric exercises from a remote location. These exercises can be extremely tailored on the requirements of each patient and can be monitored in...
Serious Games for Rehabilitation: Requirements for a Collaborative Environment
HEALTHINFO 2017 Proceedings, Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-61208-597-5, 2017
Healthcare is continually being improved, especially regarding the use of the current technologies. In the field of rehabilitation, the use of serious games and related technologies may help to develop new rehabilitation procedures. An example is a collaborative environment, in the broad sense of the word, a place where people from all areas can exchange information about the area under study. So, these possibilities create endless opportunities of use in those games and attract attention from other areas of knowledge. This contribution presents research on environments applied to the rehabilitation, focusing on the elderly. It provides an overview of the use of technological environments by health professionals who perform functions related to the rehabilitation process. For this, a questionnaire and a set of interviews with health professionals of the rehabilitation area were carried out, in order to understand the needs. The study intends to be a support for the future work in this area. The aim of this work is to study and provide a patient-adaptive collaborative environment with recourse to serious games in order to facilitate rehabilitation.
The Design of a Virtual Rehabilitation Game
This paper presents the design of a serious game to help rehabilitation of upper limbs motor dysfunction in neurological patients using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. A special type of VR, Artificial Reality (AR), is used. AR allows patients to see them projected onto a computer generated reality and their movements are sensed by a webcam with no need for devices or props. Serious games like these promote benefits to the rehabilitation process by increasing patients' motivation and making them extend the treatment for a longer period. The game, called Dance2Rehab (D2R), produces rain drops on the screen and the player should try to touch them virtually. Drops are produced to make patients execute a variety of movements on both arms mimicking some sort of dancing moves. The game accommodates differences in performance due to physical pathological limitations: (i) it can be customized once his range of motion limitations and weakness level are taken into account to alter the game for each side and each patient. This feature avoids initial frustration once the impaired arm cannot be required to move as the other; (ii) it has an adaptivity features that sense patients' performance and alter its behavior in two ways: firstly, during a session of use, the game difficulty (falling speed, number of objects in scene and, minimum heights for scoring) evolves as the patient increases the number of hits, and; secondly, on successive sessions of use, the scoring pattern changes as a function of the patients' physical conditions evolution. To this latter feature, the space of movements required from the patient is widened accordingly. A scoring pattern has been constructed in such a way that movements with wider elbow and shoulder angles are the most valued. Fine tuning the speed values, the number of difficulty levels, the scoring patterns as well as feedback sounds and information, calibration procedures and session duration, among other game features, have been done after a lot of experimentation. All experimentation was necessary because there are no guidelines to be followed and it proved to be a challenging design step because computer scientists, physiotherapists and patients´ expectations are very different. The paper describes detailed functioning of the game and the designing decision making process.
Deploying Serious Games for Cognitive Rehabilitation
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The telerehabilitation of patients with neurological lesions has recently assumed significant importance due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced the possibility of access to healthcare facilities by patients. Therefore, the possibility of exercise for these patients safely in their own homes has emerged as an essential need. Our efforts aim to provide an easy-to-implement and open-source methodology that provides doctors with a set of simple, low-cost tools to create and manage patient-adapted virtual reality telerehabilitation batteries of exercises. This is particularly important because many studies show that immediate action and appropriate, specific rehabilitation can guarantee satisfactory results. Appropriate therapy is based on crucial factors, such as the frequency, intensity, and specificity of the exercises. Our work’s most evident result is the definition of a methodology that allows the development of rehabilitation exercises with a limited effect in both econom...
International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, 2016
There are several approaches in the area of rehabilitation that invoke technology for a more comprehensive and dynamic learning process aimed at the physical and psychological recovery of a disabled person, with a view to their reintegration and possible recovery. The existence of collaborative tools used to support the rehabilitation by using communication and cooperation between patients, family and therapists on knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge building has been the subject of studies. The research topic "Exercises and Serious Games Applied to Rehabilitation" arises from the concern to understand and adapt the use of technologies for rehabilitation, and so the present work proposal aims to conduct an information collection to identify potential factors in order to adapt the technological tools to the patient's rehabilitation process. To support research we intend to analyse and work only with a specific area of rehabilitation, the physical part with a focus on body members to rehabilitate. The research involves understanding the different processes of rehabilitation and efficiency rates. It proposes to address a new methodology within the educational and rehabilitation programs that have not received the attention of current researches, and aims to relate the patient rehabilitation process with existing technological means and to investigate how this relationship can contribute to a more effective solution in the rehabilitation process. This study will be developed in the research I&D group GILT (Games, Interaction and Learning Technologies at ISEP (Superior Institute of Engineering of Porto) and in cooperation with institutions working in the area of rehabilitation, in order to obtain information and different points of view. The end result is expected to propose methodologies and to develop a platform with a set of exercises and serious games facilitators of the rehabilitation process the body members.
Serious Games to Improve the Physical Health of the Elderly: A Categorization Scheme
CENTRIC 2011, The …, 2011
this paper aims to provide a snapshot of the current status in the field of serious games for improving the physical health of the elderly. This work covers recent research projects for stroke rehabilitation and for falls prevention where user-center design methodologies were applied in order to satisfy this audience. A classification of the most relevant work in this area is provided along with a brief description of the platform, technology required and user-center design principles applied.
A Serious Games Platform for Cognitive Rehabilitation with Preliminary Evaluation
Journal of Medical Systems, 2016
In recent years Serious Games have evolved substantially, solving problems in diverse areas. In particular, in Cognitive Rehabilitation, Serious Games assume a relevant role. Traditional cognitive therapies are often considered repetitive and discouraging for patients and Serious Games can be used to create more dynamic rehabilitation processes, holding patients' attention throughout the process and motivating them during their road to recovery. This paper reviews Serious Games and user interfaces in rehabilitation area and details a Serious Games platform for Cognitive Rehabilitation that includes a set of features such as: natural and multimodal user interfaces and social features (competition, collaboration, and handicapping) which can contribute to augment the motivation of patients during the rehabilitation process. The web platform was tested with healthy subjects. Results of this preliminary evaluation show the motivation and the interest of the participants by playing the games.
Using Serious Games and Motion Tracking for Physical Rehabilitation
2020
Tele-rehabilitation has evolved significantly in recent years thanks to the latest advances and low cost of the 3D movement acquisition technologies. Autonomous physical rehabilitation from home through the use of serious games requires measuring angles of interest and compensatory angles of the patients when they perform the exercises. this work has been focused in creating a game with an architecture based on the Unity 3D engine to support rehabilitation activities. It encompasses the acquisition of an articulated skeleton, the customization of a character (avatar) in friendly scenes, and the compute of the required angles to evaluate a set of exercises.
Definition of Motion and Biophysical Indicators for Home-Based Rehabilitation through Serious Games
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In this paper, we describe Remote Monitoring Validation Engineering System (ReMoVES), a newly-developed platform for motion rehabilitation through serious games and biophysical sensors. The main features of the system are highlighted as follows: motion tracking capabilities through Microsoft Kinect V2 and Leap Motion are disclosed and compared with other solutions; the emotional state of the patient is evaluated with heart rate measurements and electrodermal activity monitored by Microsoft Band 2 during the execution of the functional exercises planned by the therapist. The ReMoVES platform is conceived for home-based rehabilitation after the hospitalisation period, and the system will deploy machine learning techniques to provide an automated evaluation of the patient performance during the training. The algorithms should deliver effective reports to the therapist about the training performance while the patient exercises on their own. The game features that will be described in this manuscript represent the input for the training set, while the feedback provided by the therapist is the output. To face this supervised learning problem, we are describing the most significant features to be used as key indicators of the patient's performance along with the evaluation of their accuracy in discriminating between good or bad patient actions.
Self-Adaptive Games for Rehabilitation at Home
Computer games are a promising tool to support rehabilitation at home. It is widely recognized that rehabilitation games should (i) be nicely integrated in general-purpose rehabilitation stations, (ii) adhere to the constraints posed by the clinical protocols, (iii) involve movements that are functional to reach the rehabilitation goal, and (iv) adapt to the patients' current status and progress. However, the vast majority of existing rehabilitation games are stand-alone applications (not integrated in a patient station), that rarely adapt to the patients' condition. In this paper, we present the first prototype of the patient rehabilitation station we developed that integrates video games for rehabilitation with methods of computational intelligence both for on-line monitoring the movements' execution during the games and for adapting the gameplay to the patients' status. The station employs a fuzzy system to monitor the exercises execution, on-line, according to the clinical constraints defined by the therapist at configuration time, and to provide direct feedback to the patients. At the same time, it applies real-time adaptation (using the Quest Bayesian adaptive approach) to modify the gameplay according both (i) to the patient current performance and progress and (ii) to the exercise plan specified by the therapist. Finally, we present one of the games available in our patient stations (designed in tight cooperation with therapists) that integrates monitoring functionalities with in-game self-adaptation to provide the best support possible to patients during their routine.