FarMyo: A Serious Game for Hand and Wrist Rehabilitation Using a Low-Cost Electromyography Device

Abstract

One of the strategies used in recent years to increase the commitment and motivation of patients undergoing rehabilitation is the use of graphical systems, such as virtual environments and serious games. In addition to contributing to the motivation, these systems can simulate real life activities and provide means to measure and assess user performance. The use of natural interaction devices, originally conceived for the game market, has allowed the development of low cost and minimally invasive rehabilitation systems. With the advent of natural interaction devices based on electromyography, the user's electromyographic data can also be used to build these systems. This paper shows the development of a serious game focused on aiding the rehabilitation process of patients with hand motor problems, targeting to solve problems related to cost, adaptability and patient motivation in this type of application. The game uses an electromyography device to recognize the gestures being performed by the user. A gesture recognition system was developed to detect new gestures, complementing the device's own recognition system, which is responsible for interpreting the signals. An initial evaluation of the game was conducted with professional physiotherapists.

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“…An example of those serious games is the FarMyo, a game to rehabilitation of patients pos stroke that uses an electromyography device to capture player movements [3] by natural interaction. Specific gestures in this rehabilitation game were recognized by neural networks.…”

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“…A common limitation presented is the lack of classification robustness. To address this, recent studies provide evidence for significant performance improvement (with respect to classification accuracy and latency) achieved with DL approaches [6,41,47].…”

Serious Gaming of Logistics Management in Pediatric Emergency Medicine

“…Serious games and interactive simulations as an intervention approach in healthcare constitute a simulation of scenarios aimed for aiding rehabilitation processes [7], improving the quality of care [8] and promoting physical activities [9]. In emergency medicine, serious games are either designed for improving crisis management skills upon escalating event, or used in simulation-based teamwork training activities for steering staff's attitudes and learning on the reaction level [10] [11].…”