A serious games framework for health rehabilitation : design considerations

Abstract

Serious games is a field of research that has evolved substantially with valuable contributions to many application domains and areas. Patients often consider traditional rehabilitation approaches to be repetitive and boring, making it difficult for them to maintain their ongoing interest and to assure the completion of the treatment program. This chapter reviews serious games and the natural and multimodal user interfaces for the health rehabilitation domain. Specifically, it details a framework for the development of serious games that integrates a rich set of features that can be used to improve the designed games with direct benefits to the rehabilitation process. Highlighted features include natural and multimodal interaction, social skills (collaboration and competitiveness), and progress monitoring. Due to the rich set of features supported by the framework, the games’ rehabilitation efficacy can be enhanced primarily from an increase in the patient’s motivation when exercising the rehabilitation tasks. A preliminary test of the framework with elderly users is described.