A Serious Games and Game Elements Based Approach for Patient Telerehabilitation Contexts

Abstract

There are several factors involved in telerehabilitation therapy, such as the patient’s engagement in the activity. In this context, the therapist’s active participation is compromised and, on the other hand, the exercises performed are often repetitive and boring, decreasing the patient’s engagement and motivation, directly impacting the results of the sessions. Considering this, this paper aims to present an approach based on an exergame (a serious game that aims to encourage physical exercise) with a distributed architecture. It was developed to assist in conducting telerehabilitation sessions that involve a cycle ergometer as a device – a bedside bicycle used in rehabilitation sessions for patients with motor disorders. In order to validate the effectiveness of this approach, the construction of an exergame prototype was undertaken, followed by two validation steps done by 16 physiotherapists from the Clinical Hospital of the Universidade Federal de Goiás - UFG (based on the Delphi Method). About 88, 8% of the specialists, after two rounds of evaluation, considered that the exergame was appropriate for telerehabilitation sessions.

Keywords

• serious games
• rehabilitation
• telerehabilitation
• game elements
• engagement