Serious games: Rehabilitation fuzzy grammar for exercise and therapy compliance

Serious Games (SG) are advocated as a technology for engaging and motivating a variety of activities, such as learning and exercising. The motivating intuition is that infusing activities with game mechanics should make them more interesting and entertaining, resulting in increased practice time, and consequently, improved performance. In our work we are interested in the role that serious games can play in rehabilitation, relying on affordable, accessible and increasingly precise bio-mechanic sensors, such as the Kinect™. In this paper, we describe a Kinect™-based system that guides players through their prescribed rehabilitation-exercise regimen at home, after a sports injury. The system is endowed with a grammar, in terms of which the rehabilitation exercises can be precisely specified by physical therapists, and a fuzzy-logic-based component that discerns in real time, whether the user "correctly" follows the prescribed regimen. To respect the privacy of the player, the system mimics the postures into an avatar. We demonstrate our system through the development of three different games.