NUI therapeutic serious games with metrics validation based on wearable devices

The physical rehabilitation community has been demonstrating serious interest for therapeutic serious games (theragames). The paper presents a framework for theragames enriched by a natural user interface (NUI) and materialized by Kinect. A set of 3D virtual reality (VR) scenarios motivate patients to perform upper limb rehabilitation and provide armmotion metrics in an unobtrusive way. The measurements are verified using a set of wearable inertial measurement units (IMU) attached to the upper limbs. The framework is planned to be included as part of a remote physiotherapy service that may improve the physical rehabilitation process. Experimental results and appropriate data processing is included in the paper.