New Forms of Interaction in Serious Games for Rehabilitation

Abstract

This chapter addresses up-to-date research development regarding the adoption of more natural forms of interaction in the Serious Games for Rehabilitation domain of application. The chapter starts by presenting fundamental concepts on Serious Games illustrated by relevant applications. It describes the main problems involved and how Serious Games can benefit the process of rehabilitation. A comprehensive literature survey is presented and accompanied by a proposed set of classification criteria towards a taxonomy. From this study, a main research opportunity the authors identified is the potential benefits of the adoption of natural interaction modalities. The remainder of the chapter presents the authors’ recent work on this subject, including the description and design of game prototypes using alternative and natural interaction modalities. The chapter presents experiments and the results of a user study in order to make it possible to conclude about the benefits of the newer forms of interaction. From this study, it was concluded that the introduction of the natural interaction modalities has increased the attractiveness and intuitiveness of the prototyped Serious Game. This important result is a motivating factor to improve the interaction mechanisms and conduct studies with distinct tasks and larger samples of users/patients. Lastly, the authors report identified research opportunities and open problems.

A Serious Games Platform for Cognitive Rehabilitation with Preliminary Evaluation

“…For example, capturing the lip movements can help in the speech recognition process [13]. An architecture [7] that accommodates the inclusion of several modalities as modules and also some previous studies [6,10] on usability are described in [6,7,10].…”

“…Human actions are interpreted by machines as commands that control system operations [26]. This means that humans are able to use the system with very little practice, through natural movements / actions, since these behaviors are deeply rooted in their daily experiments, reducing the cost of system use, time of learning, and time of getting used to the system commands, and making the interaction easier to handle and more intuitive [6,27,28]. The main objective in this approach is to interact with the computer the way we interact with the world [18].…”

“…Despite literature review shows that Serious Games are most commonly used in physical rehabilitation therapy processes [5], several examples of serious games studies used for cognitive rehabilitation can be found. However, for most of these studies we found that they are still prototypes in development or in testing phase [6][7][8][9].…”

Vision-Based Portuguese Sign Language Recognition System

“…Their test results showed that the Fourier descriptors and the Manhattan distance-based classifier achieved recognition rates of 95% with small computational latency. In terms of classification and learning, machine learning algorithms have been applied successfully to many fields of research like, face recognition and facial expressions [19,20], automatic recognition of a musical gesture by a computer [21], classification of robotic soccer formations [22], classifying human physical activity from on-body accelerometers [23], automatic road-sign detection [24,25], static hand gesture classification [26], serious games applied to rehabilitation [27][28][29][30] and intelligent wheelchairs [20,[31][32][33][34].…”

Architecture for Serious Games in Health Rehabilitation

“…It has been shown that most of these patients sometimes get into depression as soon as the rehabilitation program begins, contributing to increase even more the associated healthcare costs. In previous studies [1][2][3][4] we discuss issues and identified features that could benefit the rehabilitation process using Serious Games. Based on that the main objective of this work is to describe our work regarding the design and implementation of an hardware/software architecture for the development of Serious Games in Health Rehabilitation, to augment patients' motivation during their recuperation plan and that integrates the set of features we find as relevant to this process.…”