Conference Book of Abstracts - ICDVRAT

Session VI: Motor RehabilitationSerious games for physical rehabilitation: designing highly configurableand adaptable gamesL Omelina, B Jansen, B Bonnechère, S Van Sint Jan, J CornelisVrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, BELGIUMInterdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, Ghent, BELGIUMUniversité Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, BELGIUMABSTRACTComputer games have been recognized as a motivational tool in rehabilitation for a decade.Traditional rehabilitation includes exercises which are often considered as repetitive, boringand requires supervision by the therapist. New opportunities in rehabilitation have risen withthe emerging popularity of computer games and novel input sensors like 3D cameras, balanceboards or accelerometers. Despite active research in this area, there is still lack of availablegames for rehabilitation mainly due to many different requirements that have to be met foreach type of therapy. In this paper we propose a specialized configurable architecture forrevalidation games, focusing on neuro-muscular rehabilitation. The proposed architectureenables a therapist to define game controls depending on the patient needs and without anyprograming skills. We have also implemented a system meeting this architecture and fourgames using the system in order to verify correctness and functionality of the proposedarchitecture.a) b)Figure 3. a) Flying simulator game, b) HitTheBoxes game.L Omelina, B Jansen, B Bonnechère, S Van Sint Jan, J Cornelis, Serious games for physicalrehabilitation: designing highly configurable and adaptable games, Proc. 9 th Intl Conf. on Disability, VirtualReality and Assoc. Technologies, P M Sharkey, E Klinger (Eds), pp. 195201, Laval, France, 10 12 Sept.2012.Proc. 9 th Intl Conf. Disability, Virtual Reality & Associated TechnologiesLaval, France, 10–12 Sept. 20122012 ICDVRAT; ISBN 978-0-7049-1545-9xlvii.