Social Integration of Stroke Patients through the Multiplayer Rehabilitation Gaming System

Abstract. Stroke is a leading cause of serious long-term disability in adults (Go et al, 2013). The impact of stroke induced impairments goes beyond the mere loss of motor abilities. The psychosocial implications caused by changes in per-formance of the activities of daily living have to be considered in modern reha-bilitation processes since they do influence the potential outcome. From the perspective of traditional rehabilitation it is difficult to directly address these social factors. Here we propose to capitalize on a rising trend in rehabilitation to deploy virtual reality environments in order to overcome this limitation. By cre-ating a multiplayer game that enhances performance of the patient through an adaptive mapping methodology, we compensate for motor impairments and al-low the patient to interact with other participants on an equal level. We propose that this approach influences psychosocial dynamics as it changes the partici-pant’s mutual perception. We conducted a psychosocial study to gain insight into the patients ’ social environment and tested the system in two at home ex-periments. The results suggest that our system is able to equalize a healthy and disabled player and benefits the social interaction.