NuSense: A Sensor-Based Framework for Ambient Awareness applied in Game Therapy Monitoring

the usage of technologies for the treatment of patients is constantly emerging. A recent trend is the usage of games for healthcare, mainly in motor rehabilitation. The entertainment facet of the game attracts the attention of patients making them more engaged in the treatment. A difficult in the usage of commercial games is that they require full attention of the healthcare professionals, since they were not created to this purpose. To contour this kind of situation, decreasing the attention demanded by healthcare professionals, tailor-made games with monitoring capabilities have been developed. The problem with this approach is that these games falls short of entertainment, compromising their playfulness. Given this scenario, we believe that by adding monitoring capabilities to environments in which commercial games are used for health treatment is the best approach for game therapy. Therefore, it is necessary to create a mechanism that helps developers on building applications to monitoring patients’ pre-determined characteristics during a gameplay. In this paper, we propose the NuSense, a sensor-based framework to support the development of applications to automatically monitoring people while they are playing electronic games as a health therapy.