Pedro Miguel Moreira

Architecture for Serious Games in Health Rehabilitation

Serious Games is a field of research that has been growing substantially with valuable contributions to many application areas. Traditional rehabilitation approaches are often considered repetitive and boring by the patients, resulting in difficulties to maintain their interest and to assure the completion of the treatment program. This paper describes a framework for the development of Serious Games that integrates a rich set of features including natural and multimodal interaction, social skills (collaboration and competitiveness) and progress monitoring which can be used to improve the designed games with direct benefits to the rehabilitation process. This improvement in the games’ rehabilitation efficacy mainly arises from an increase in the patient’s motivation when exercising the rehabilitation tasks due to the rich set of features provide by the framework.

Serious games for cognitive rehabilitation: Forms of interaction and social dimension

Rehabilitation processes follow, as a rule, intensive training programs, composed of repetitive and monotonous tasks for patients. The introduction of serious games in these processes can help in motivating patients, increasing their interest in the exercises to perform. These games should be set taking into account characteristics that are able to stimulate and train cognitive functions as well as features that require some kind of motor activity in order to stimulate and attract patients attention. This article presents a literature review on serious games for cognitive rehabilitation and a set of characteristics that are considered important for serious game development in this area which include the use of natural and multimodal interfaces and a social dimension such as collaboration, competition and the concept of handicap.

A Web Platform of Serious Games for Cognitive Rehabilitation: Architecture and Usability Study

In recent years Serious Games have gained a new importance, very driven by the proliferation of video games and its application in diverse areas. Cognitive rehabilitation is a major area where Serious Games can assume a relevant role. Traditional cognitive therapies quickly become repetitive and discouraging for patients. To mitigate these problems, Serious Games based tools are necessary to create more dynamic rehabilitation processes, holding the attention of the patients throughout the process and motivating them during their road to recovery. This paper describes a web platform for Serious Games in cognitive rehabilitation that integrates a set of features that include natural and multimodal user interfaces and social features (collaboration, competition and handicapping) which can be used to augment the motivation of patients during the rehabilitation process. Results observed in a study with healthy subjects indicate that the platform offers good usability.

A Serious Games Platform for Cognitive Rehabilitation with Preliminary Evaluation

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.

Any object is a PC controller

Computer technology continuously evolves at an incredible pace, with todays machines being barely recognizable when compared to the first computers ever created. Despite this, and in spite of the many advances in human-machine interactions, the main method for interfacing with computers has remained the same for several decades. Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) are an interesting alternative to the classical Graphics User Interfaces (GUI) that dominate the field. This type of interface seeks to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds by binding virtual data to physical objects. This allows users to directly manipulate digital information with more natural and intuitive gestures, simply by interacting with the corresponding objects. This concept provides a wide world of possibilities to create more engaging and immersive interfaces capable of greatly improving user experience. The work herein presented tackles this problem and proposes the creation of a framework, capable of enabling the activation of everyday objects as controllers for diverse applications. The framework should make use of an accessible sensor such as a camera, to detect objects and assign them tasks. Direct manipulation of objects by the users should generate an event. Events should be able to be communicated in a clear way to client applications connected to the system. A demo application is described to demonstrate practical applications for the proposed system.

New forms of interaction in serious games for cognitive rehabilitation: Implementation and usability study

Serious Games are an important tool in health rehabilitation, contributing to increase the motivation of patients in the completion of tasks included in their recovery programs. Following the study of the set of features which can be used to improve cognitive therapy processes, making them more motivating for the patients, we develop a web platform composed of a set of games that seek to integrate the proposed features. In this paper we present the serious games currently deployed in the platform and the results of user tests performed in order to evaluate its usability and attractiveness. Overall, subjects reported a positive gaming experience for all the games, registering the highest values in the multiplayer and competition aspects. We intend in the future to test the games on a population with various kinds of limitations.