A web-based gamification of upper extremity robotic rehabilitation

Abstract

In recent years, gamification has become very popular for rehabilitating different cognitive and motor problems. It has been shown that rehabilitation is effective when it starts early enough and it is intensive and repetitive. However, the success of rehabilitation depends also on the motivation and perseverance of patients during treatment. Adding serious games to the rehabilitation procedure will help the patients to overcome the monotonicity of the treatment procedure better. On the other hand, if we can use different serious games with a robotic rehabilitation system, it will help us to define more easily tasks with different levels of difficulty, or again, to set up more options for patients to choose the desired game, among the existing games, for practicing the therapeutic tasks. This article provides a procedure for connecting a rehabilitation robot to several web games. In this vein, we designed an interface and connected our robot to the computer with a serial port. Finally, we proved our method with a survey from an experiment, And we demonstrate that having several games besides rehabilitation makes the procedure of rehabilitation entertaining.