Comprehensive and Gamified Rehabilitation System for Upper-Limb Impairment Treatments

There are several major barriers in the rehabilitation process, such as transportation problems, the repetitive nature of traditional rehabilitation exercises, and lack of motivation, also some difficulties in managing a center for this purpose. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive rehabilitation system in order to mitigate and obviate some of these major problems. We have developed a Human-Computer Interaction form of treatment, using gamification methods and a low-cost, efficient, and specific movement data acquisition system so as to motivate patients to increase their movement domain and help them to find practices more exciting. We have implemented four different games specifically designed for rehabilitation purposes to be effective in the recovery procedure and to be visually attractive for patients. In addition, we have presented a well-organized software for patients’ management purposes and tracking their recovery procedure via pertinent diagrams. More importantly, while other previous gamified systems are suffering from fake movements by patients in order to accomplish their game achievements, we have provided a method to prevent this very effectively. Ultimately, we performed an experiment on 12 patients with upper limb impairment to assess the effectiveness of our system. The result of the questionnaire shows that almost all of the patients stated the efficacy of this system in all claimed areas. Moreover, the study revealed a favorable increase in patients’ movement domain using the system and practically illustrated the frequency of non-relevant joint utilization by patients during practices.