RehaBot: Gamified Virtual Assistants Towards Adaptive TeleRehabilitation

Abstract

This paper introduces 'RehaBot', a framework for building adaptive serious games in the context of telerehabilitation. RehaBot takes advantage of 3D motion tracking and virtual reality devices, to develop an immersive and gamified telerehabilitation environment. A personalized and adaptive gaming system is developed, which allows patients to perform exercises with the help of embedded virtual assistants, hereafter called 'rehab bots', that are dynamically displayed within scenes to guide the patient through the different sets of gestures required to complete the session. These rehab bots have the ability to learn and adapt to the best level of difficulty in real-time based on the user performance. An intelligent alerting and automatic correction technique is incorporated within our engine, so that pre-calculated gesture patterns are correlated and matched with patients' gestures. Consequently, the system estimates the perceived difficulty of gestures by the patient, and automatically adjusts the game behavior to ensure a highly engaging and adaptive gaming experience. Furthermore, multimodal instructions are conveyed to users with details on joints that are not performing as expected, and to guide them towards improving the current gesture. A pilot study has been conducted to prove the usability and effectiveness of our adaptive physiotherapy solution.