Designing motivational games for stroke rehabilitation

Motivation plays in important role in rehabilitation after stroke. Multi-modal games can provide an engaging and interactive platform to motivate people to actively participate in the therapy. Designing games for rehabilitation requires input from both multiple stakeholders such as the medical, bioengineering and game design fields. In order to bridge this gap, we implemented and tested games specifically designed for upper limb rehabilitation and observed their effects on players. This paper presents the design process for three rehabilitation games and their effects on motivation of a single stroke patient. These results indicate that engagement and enjoyment vary for the three different games while managing to achieve repetitive number of hand and wrist gestures in the background. In our summative evaluation planned to be conducted in patients´ homes, 9 different games, including the three presented here, are provided to allow for providing a better range and a wider choice. Use-logs as well as the questionnaire trialed in this study will be used to assess preference and motivation, and to explore if current feedback will be repeated by a larger number of stroke patients and a wider range of impairments and preferences. These will further inform the process of game design for rehabilitation and personal well-being.