Serious games for stroke patients: Attending to clinical staff's voices

Abstract

A motion-based rehabilitation game is gaining a solid ground in that it can provide thestroke patients with the repetitive training effect for a functional improvement of upper extremity(UE). Many proved potential utilities of the motion-based rehabilitation games for the firststakeholders, i.e., patients, but the organizational benefits for other key stakeholders (e.g., clinicalstaff such as physiatrists and occupational therapists) have been less attended. This paper reports onour design experience of a natural interaction based rehabilitation program ? ‘RehabMaster’,addressing the rather different requirements from the clinical staffs. A practical rehabilitationsession assessed a two-week clinical trial with sixteen stroke patients, seven physiatrists and threeoccupational therapists, and essential requirements of the clinical staffs were observed. We learntthat a key to the clinical-level serious game design is to mimic actual social settings of what thestakeholders are indeed interacting with.