Serious Games for Virtual Rehabilitation in a Large Scale Virtual Reality Environment

Virtual Rehabilitation is becoming popular in clinical research thanks to the development and availability of new immersive technologies. For example, the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients frequently uses virtual reality, and sometimes employs a first-person Serious Games approach to make therapy more enjoyable for patients (see Section 2). In such approaches, the patient experiences the virtual environment in a first-person view. Unlike the existing body of work, we present two virtual rehabilitation applications and we evaluate one of them, which uses both a first person perspective, where the patient controls only the arms of a 3D avatar, and a third person perspective, where the patient controls with his/her body a 3D avatar. The application was commissioned by biomechanics researchers at a major center for rehabilitation research, and could be used to compare the learning-curve and time needed for rehabilitation across different therapies and environments. One of the main challenges in this work is the design of simple, non-distracting avatars and virtual world, which allows the patient to focus on correctly performing the rehabilitation exercises while providing an enjoyable and entertaining experience. Our first solution is RehabJim, a third-person and first-person serious game for the rehabilitation of upper limbs in post-stroke patients, with particular emphasis on reaching movements. Our second solution is CAVEChef, a third-person serious game for walking rehabilitation in post-stroke patients. Our solutions use a state-of-the-art virtual reality environment and Unity 3D. The first one uses a Kinect controller, while the second one ten Vicon Bonita infrared cameras as tracking devices.