ARTICLE
TITLE

FarMyo: A Serious Game for Hand and Wrist Rehabilitation Using a Low-Cost Electromyography Device

SUMMARY

One of the strategies used in recent years to increase the commitment and motivation of patients undergoing rehabilitation is the use of graphical systems, such as virtual environments and serious games. In addition to contributing to the motivation, these systems can simulate real life activities and provide means to measure and assess user performance. The use of natural interaction devices, originally conceived for the game market, has allowed the development of low cost and minimally invasive rehabilitation systems. With the advent of natural interaction devices based on electromyography, the user's electromyographic data can also be used to build these systems. This paper shows the development of a serious game focused on aiding the rehabilitation process of patients with hand motor problems, targeting to solve problems related to cost, adaptability and patient motivation in this type of application. The game uses an electromyography device to recognize the gestures being performed by the user. A gesture recognition system was developed to detect new gestures, complementing the device's own recognition system, which is responsible for interpreting the signals. An initial evaluation of the game was conducted with professional physiotherapists.

 Articles related

Rana Massoud, Stefan Poslad, Francesco Bellotti, Riccardo Berta, Kamyar Mehran, Alessandro De Gloria    

Reality-enhanced gaming is an emerging serious game genre, that could contextualize a game within its real instruction-target environment. A key module for such games is the evaluator, that senses a user performance and provides consequent input to the g... see more


Marcus Toftedahl, Per Backlund, Henrik Engström    

The focus of this paper is the design and player reception of a serious game called Missing released on Google Play with the intention of spreading awareness of trafficking and its impact on individuals and society. The aim of the paper is to investigate... see more


Michael Kickmeier-Rust, Andreas Holzinger    

The success of serious games usually depends on their capabilities to engage learners and to provide them with personalized gaming and learning experiences. Therefore, it is important to equip a game, as an autonomous computer system, with a certain leve... see more


Laurence Hanes, Robert Stone    

Virtual environments are an important aspect of serious games for heritage. However navigable three-dimensional (3D) environments can be costly and resource-intensive to create and for users to run. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach using... see more


Enkhbold Nyamsuren, Han L.J. van der Maas, Matthias Maurer    

The Computerized Adaptive Practice (CAP) system describes a set of algorithms for assessing player’s expertise and difficulties of in-game problems and for adapting the latter to the former. However, an effective use of CAP requires that in-game problems... see more