Nadia Hocine

Adaptation in serious games for upper-limb rehabilitation: an approach to improve training outcomes

In this paper, we propose a game adaptation technique that seeks to improve the training outcomes of stroke patients during a therapeutic session. This technique involves the generation of customized game levels, which difficulty is dynamically adjusted to the patients’ abilities and performance. Our goal was to evaluate the effect of this adaptation strategy on the training outcomes of post-stroke patients during a therapeutic session. We hypothesized that a dynamic difficulty adaptation strategy would have a more positive effect on the training outcomes of patients than two control strategies, incremental difficulty adaptation and random difficulty adaptation. To test these strategies, we developed three versions of PRehab, a serious game for upper-limb rehabilitation. Seven stroke patients and three therapists participated in the experiment, and played all three versions of the game on a graphics tablet. The results of the experiment show that our dynamic adaptation technique increases movement amplitude during a therapeutic session. This finding may serve as a basis to improve patient recovery.

Digital-pheromone based difficulty adaptation in post-stroke therapeutic games

In this paper, we propose a dynamic difficulty adaptation approach for serious games dedicated to upper-limb rehabilitation after stroke. The proposed approach aims to provide a personalized rehabilitation session in which the training intensity and challenges can be adapted to patients abilities and training needs. The objective is to increase the rehabilitation volume by getting the patient engaged in the therapy session. This approach has been implemented and tested through a point and click game. It has been also experimented on healthy people in order to explain how this approach will be integrated to post-stroke therapeutic games.

Dynamic Difficulty Adaptation in Serious Games for Motor Rehabilitation

In the last few years, a growing interest has been devoted to improve rehabilitation strategies by including serious games in the therapy process. Adaptive serious games seek to provide the patients with an individualized rehabilitation environment that meets their training needs. In this paper, a dynamic difficulty adaptation (DDA) technique is suggested. This technique focuses on the online adaptation of the game difficulty by taking into account patients’ abilities and motivation. The results of the experiment show that the adaptation technique increases the number of tasks, number of successful tasks as well as the movement amplitude during a game session. The technique positively effects the training outcomes of stroke patients, which can help them to recover their functions.

Network Aware Traffic Adaptation for Cloud Games

Current cloud gaming systems have very strong requirements in terms of network resources. For pervasive gaming in various environments like at home, hotels, internet cafes, or area with limited or unstable network access, it is beneficial to avoid the necessity of having a costly steady fast speed internet connection to be able to run these cloud games. We present a network aware adaptation technique based on the level of detail (LoD) approach in 3D graphics. It maintains a bidirectional multi-level quality of service for game entities at runtime, lessening the games communication cost when it notices a decrease in network resources and maintains an optimal communication frequency otherwise. It therefore reduces the impact of poor and unstable network parameters (delay, packet loss, jitter) on game interactivity while improving users quality of experience (QoE). The evaluation of our approach through a pilot experiment shows that the proposed technique provides a significant QoE enhancement.

Level of detail based network adapted synchronization for cloud gaming

Video games are considered as a major arena of popular entertainment. They can include immersive actions, high visuals and hair-trigger responsiveness requiring devices with high performance e.g. console and dedicated PCs. With the arrival of cloud gaming, games can be hosted in a centralize server and access through the internet by thin client with modest capabilities. Cloud computing in game context has attracted significant attention due to its major characteristics of scalability, availability and computational power. However, current cloud gaming systems have very strong requirements in terms of bandwith and network resources. Thus, when used devices have little bandwith and/or people are located in area with limited network connectivity, they can not take advantage of these services. This paper presents an adaptation technique inspired by the level of detail (LoD) approach in 3D graphics. It is based on a cloud gaming paradigm in other to minimize the effect of poor network parameters (delay, loss, jitter) in order to enhance the game interactivity and improve the player quality of experience (QoE). A pilot experiment has been carried out to evaluate the approach through a proof of concept game. The pilot experiment shows that LoD based adaptation in cloud gaming allows enhancing the QoE.