Towards customizable games for stroke rehabilitation

  • Authors:

  • Gazihan Alankus;Amanda Lazar;Matt May;Caitlin Kelleher

  • Affiliations:

  • Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA;University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA;Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Stroke is the leading cause of long term disability among adults in industrialized nations. The partial paralysis that stroke patients often experience can make independent living difficult or impossible. Research suggests that many of these patients could recover by performing hundreds of daily repetitions of motions with their affected limbs. Yet, only 31% of patients perform the exercises recommended by their therapists. Home-based stroke rehabilitation games may help motivate stroke patients to perform the necessary exercises to recover. In this paper, we describe a formative study in which we designed and user tested stroke rehabilitation games with both stroke patients and therapists. We describe the lessons we learned about what makes games useful from a therapeutic point of view.