Clinical evolution or familiarization?: Time analysis of serious games exercises to assess the learning effect

Thanks to the evolution of game controllers (mainly the Kinect™ sensor and the Balance Board™), video games are becoming more and more popular in physical rehabilitation. Indeed the integration of serious games in rehabilitation has been tested for various pathologies (e.g. brain stroke, cerebral palsy, Parkinson´s disease...). Parallel to this clinical research, a lot of studies have been done in order to validate the use of these game controllers for simple biomechanical evaluation. Currently, it is thus possible to record the motions performed by the patients during serious gaming exercises for later analysis. Therefore, data collected during the exercises could be used for monitoring the evolution of the patients during long term rehabilitation. Before using the parameters extracted from the games to assess patients´ evolution two important aspects must be verified: the reproducibility of measurement and a possible effect of learning of the task to be performed. To evaluate these parameters two specially developed games for physical rehabilitation were used. Ten healthy adults played 9 sessions of games over a 3 weeks period. Different parameters were extracted from the games: time, range of motion, reaching area... ANOVA and ICC were processed to evaluate reproducibility of measurement. The majority of the learning effect occurred during the very first session. Therefore, in order to allow regular monitoring the results of this first session should not be included in the follow-up of the patient.