Exergaming for Autonomous Rehabilitation

Novel gaming devices, like the Nintendo balance board and the Microsoft Kinect, have opened the possibility to do autonomous rehabilitation at home, where patients are guided by adequate video-games that are named therapeutic exer-games. To ensure safety and effectiveness, it has become soon evident that some form of supervision through technology itself is required. This has led to the development of a three-layers architecture designed inside the EC funded REWIRE project constituted of a hospital station (HS), a networking station (NS), and a patient station (PS). In this paper we define the challenges for the Patient Station and how these could be addressed. The PS is installed at patient’s home to guide him/her in the rehabilitation exercises through video-games designed to train a specific function. The PS is constituted of a classical game engine, on top of which several functions, specifically devoted to autonomous rehabilitation at home, have been added: configuration and real-time adaptation of the level of difficulty of the exer-games, monitoring the healthiness of motion pattern used by the patient, capability of interfacing different tracking device and log motion data. Moreover, a virtual therapist avatar has been fully integrated to maximize compliance, along with randomization of assets and background music.