Interaction Design for Rehabiliation

Abstract

Well-known trends pertaining to the aging of population and the rising costs of healthcare motivate the development of rehabilitation technology. There is a considerable body of work in this area including efforts to make serious games, virtual reality and robotic applications. While innovative technologies have been introduced over the years, and often researchers produce promising experimental results, these technologies have not yet delivered the anticipated benefits. The causes for this apparent failure are evident when looking a closer look at the case of stroke rehabilitation, which is one of the heaviest researched topics for developing rehabilitation technologies. It is argued that improvements should be sought by centering the design on an understanding of patient needs, allowing patients, therapists and care givers in general to personalize solutions to the need of patients, effective feedback and motivation strategies to be implemented, and an in depth understanding of the socio-technical system in which the rehabilitation technology will be embedded. These are classic challenges that human computer interaction (HCI) researchers have been dealing with for years, which is why the field of rehabilitation technology requires considerable input from HCI researchers, and which explains the growing number of relevant HCI publications pertaining to rehabilitation. The talk reviews related research carried out at the Eindhoven University of Technology together with collaborating institutes, which has examined the value of tangible user interfaces and embodied interaction in rehabilitation, how designing playful interactions or games with a functional purpose., feedback design. I shall discuss the work we have done to develop rehabilitation technologies for the TagTrrainer system in the doctoral research of Daniel Tetteroo [2,3,4] and the explorations on wearable solutions in the doctoral research of Wang Qi.[5,6]. With our research being design driven and explorative, I will discuss also the current state of the art for the field and the challenges that need to be addressed for human computer interaction research to make a larger impact in the domain of rehabilitation technology.