Games for Physical Therapy

One in six people in the world will experience a stroke in their lifetime. A large proportion of these survivors will have motor impairments as a result of this. Physical therapy can help stroke sufferers to overcome these limitations. Research suggests that the brain can be provided with sufficient stimuli to remodel itself and to provide better motor control through repetitive exercises. However, several hundred daily repetitions may be required to make recovery progress, a figure that is larger than the number of exercises in a typical therapy session. Therapists overcome this by prescribing home exercises as a component of outpatient therapy. However, patients often find the repetitive exercises boring and less than a third of people perform them as recommended. Other common rehabilitation problems include high healthcare and travel costs to attend clinic sessions. An alternative way to complete prescribed home exercises is to leverage interactive technologies such as video games with motionbased input devices. Motion-based games help to increase the likelihood that a patient will complete therapeutic exercises at home by using a game context to motivate the patients. The scope of this paper is to explore the interactive technologies that are used to develop these games, and their value in the context of stroke rehabilitation. The games will be evaluated from both a result focused perspective and patient usability perspective. Author