Title:	THE DESIGN OF A VIRTUAL REHABILITATION GAME
Author(s):	Alessandro Diogo Bruckheimer, Marcelo da Silva Hounsell, Antônio Vinícius Soares
ISBN:	978-989-8533-06-7
Editors:	Hans Weghorn, Leonardo Azevedo and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2011
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Serious Games; Virtual Rehabilitation; Adaptivity; Game Design
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	339
Last Page:	346
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	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.
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