Tele-Rehabilitation Games on the Cloud: A Survey and a Vision

Rehabilitation is an important branch of health care that aims to restore some or all of the patient's physical, sensory, and/or mental capabilities that were lost due to injury, illness, or disease. With the increasing number of people with disabilities, more specialized rehabilitation staff and facilities are needed. However, evidence suggests that people with disabilities face barriers in accessing the health and rehabilitation services they need in many settings. Therefore, Telerehabilitation has emerged as an evolutionary field of tele-medicine to overcome this availability problem by providing a wide range of consultative, preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic services via the internet. Pairing these practices with game-based therapy has proved to increase their potential impact specially with pediatric populations. This paper gives a survey on some existing studies and suggests moving these telerehabilitation games into the cloud for the sake of convenience and flexibility.