Designing personalized therapeutic serious games for a pervasive assistive environment

Serious games-based therapies are currently gaining massive interest of both computer science and healthcare communities. This paper focuses on the design and use of personalized therapeutic serious games in a pervasive healthcare assistive environment that integrates smart objects such as wheelchairs. The smart objects have embedded sensors to measure physiological parameters. Tablet PCs are being attached to the wheelchairs, serving several application purposes. We are in the process of studying and developing a serious games model, taking into account elements such as the use of RFID for game playing, tablets for interaction and patient´s physiological vital signals for personalization and adaptation issues. The first prototype is directed to address therapeutics activities in aphasia and alexia, the most common speech and language disturbance in stroke and head trauma. The paper also describes the rationale, the game description and the main development issues behind this prototype.