Proteo: A Framework for Serious Games in Telerehabilitation

Abstract

Within the context of telerehabilitation, serious games have a significant role, but creating software for serious games is resource demanding. We present Proteo, a modular and open-source framework for developing serious games from scratch. We also present two serious game implementation examples with analysis of end user and therapist/researcher satisfaction. By involving a group of 11 specialized therapists and 9 end users we analyzed the Proteo’s user satisfaction. We found that both groups scored high for the level of involvement, and the therapists scored also high for the level of suitability. More in depth, both groups showed significant differences between positive and negative feelings, with positive feelings scoring higher than negative ones. Finally, the user level of suitability was reported as high while the difficulty of the system and the difficulty of the task were reported as low. Proteo has proven to be a useful tool to develop serious games for telerehabilitation and has been well accepted by the users involved in the evaluation tests.

Keywords

• telerehabilitation
• serious games
• human–computer interaction