Towards procedural level generation for rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of procedural content generation for physical rehabilitation. In this initial study a ski-slalom game is developed on the Wii platform that procedurally places the gates of the game according to player performance. A preliminary game evaluation study is conducted on patients with injured legs and showcases the efficiency of the procedural gate generation mechanism tailoring the game difficulty to match rehabilitation goals. The study also validates certain usability aspects of the patients.

Procedural Audio in Computer Games Using Motion Controllers: An Evaluation on the Effect and Perception

“…The skiing game was originally developed at the IT University of Copenhagen with the purpose of rehabilitation therapy [20]. The version of the game tested in this experiment was a strongly modified version of the original game, including procedural audio as well as different control mappings and animations.…”

10 Years of the PCG workshop: Past and Future Trends

“…Among other genres mentioned in Table 2, worth noting are serious games and real-world simulations. "Serious" games, or games with a purpose beyond entertainment, have been targeted by PCG workshop papers in the context of language learning [67], rehabilitation [3,22], training scenarios [52,59] and human computation [108]. Real-world simulations have also been common, simulating realistic urban planning [41,75,86,93], architecture & interior design [7,79,103], environments [1], locomotion [48] or economies [52].…”

“…Quantitative evaluation is primarily applied on level generation tasks (87% of evaluation papers), and in papers using constructive methods (26%), artificial evolution (22%) or declarative programming (19%). Evaluation is sometimes performed through expressive range analysis (22% of evaluation papers), sometimes based on experiments with human participants [2,4,22,39], but usually focus on the statistical analysis of computation time (e.g. [27]), fitness (e.g.…”

Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation

“…The type and nature of playing experience is hand-crafted by the designer and depended on the game under investigation and the optimization goals set. For instance, a designer might need to draw a mapping between player experience and acceleration of the rehabilitation process via a Wiihabilitation game [84] and design an evaluation function that encapsulates that. Or, alternatively, the designer might want to design an evaluation function that reflects to the successful training of social skills within a serious game [85].…”

“…In theory-driven functions, the designer is guided by intuition and/or some qualitative theory of emotion or player experience to derive a mapping between an experience model and the quality of content. Examples of theory-driven direct evaluation functions can be found in the following studies: [23], [84], [86], [21], [77], [66]. On the other hand, data-driven functions are based on collecting data on the effect of various examples of content via e.g.…”