The design of a comprehensive game engine for rehabilitation

Abstract

Physical and cognitive rehabilitation under the form of therapeutic videogames has been growing in popularity over the last years. Many rehabilitation games (or exergames) have been created with the intent to promote functional rehabilitation in a highly motivational environment. However, such exergames are often created as standalone products typically designed to target a specific exercise. Accordingly, they are usually difficult to integrate in a more structured therapy and also have very different and varied features. There is therefore a need in this area for a more holistic approach with game engines specifically designed for rehabilitation that would represent the next step in this field to guarantee efficacy, accessibility and motivational factors of exergames. In this paper, we present our Intelligent Game Engine for Rehabilitation (IGER) that tries to address these issues; we highlight the features it supports, we present some of the games we created with it, and the initial results we achieved so far.