Player Profile as a Lens to Advocate Designing Compassionate Therapy Games for Parkinson’s disease

Therapy games aim to leverage the motivational power of video games towards increasing adherence to therapy, inducing and maintaining motivation, elevating mood, and encouraging physical and/or cognitive activity. Commercial games tend to offer an attractive gameplay, but usually do not consider the rehabilitation needs or physical and cognitive abilities of the player. In order to overcome this shortcoming many custom-built therapy games have been proposed, which focus on the rehabilitation process, but often struggle to offer a compelling enough game experience for long term engagement. In this paper we present a novel framework for helping developers to profile users of a rehabilitation game in order to support a more compassionate and effective design. The framework was derived by systematically reviewing the design and effectiveness of existing therapy games for rehabilitation of people living with Parkinson’s disease. Nonetheless, we believe the resulting framework can also be applied to therapy games for other disorders.