Serious game for functional rehabilitation

Abstract

Conventional musculoskeletal rehabilitation consists of a therapy consultancy, an exercise assignment, and an execution task with or without assistance of the therapist. This classical approach consumes much of the patient's time, money and effort, as well as the medical staff's. Serious games have been devised as an aided tool for clinical and home-based rehabilitation, with patient autonomy in the exercise execution but monitored by the therapist. The aim of this present study was to develop a real-time serious gaming system including a series of locomotion training exercises for musculoskeletal rehabilitation. Kinect sensor was used to capture real-time kinematics during each exercise. Six exercises with different levels of difficulties were designed and created. Several graphical user interfaces were developed for 3D animation and kinematic feedback tracking and visualization. An evaluation campaign with ten healthy subjects was established to assess the developed system. Obtained results showed that our system is robust and user-friendly for motivating the patient during his functional rehabilitation program at his clinic or at home.