Reinforcing motor re-training and rehabilitation through games: a machine-learning perspective

tation is usually obtained by either a real teacher (e.g. the physical therapist), or a vir-tual teacher (such as in virtual reality-based rehabilitation), thus triggering an instance of the learning-by- imitation scheme. If the rehabilitation exercises are administered in a game fashion, which means asking the player to choose a solution in terms of movement execution out of a number of discrete possi-ble alternatives, we can hypothesize that this is an example of a reinforcement-learning scheme (Sutton and Barto, 1998). The internal model hypothesis, i.e. the presence of an internal representation of the dynamics and kinematics of movemen