Cooperative Cooking: A Novel Virtual Environment for Upper Limb Rehabilitation

Motor rehabilitation technologies commonly include virtual environments that motivate patients to exercise more often or more intensely. In this paper, we present a novel virtual rehabilitation environment in which two people work together to prepare meals. The players' roles can be fixed or undefined, and optional challenges can be added in the form of flies that must be swatted away. A preliminary evaluation with 12 pairs of unimpaired participants showed that participants prefer cooperating over exercising alone and feel less pressured when cooperating. Furthermore, participants enjoyed the addition of flies and preferred not to have defined roles. Finally, no significant decrease in exercise intensity was observed as a result of cooperation. These results indicate that cooperation could improve motor rehabilitation by increasing motivation, though the virtual environment needs to be evaluated with participants with motor impairment.