Serious Games for Stroke Rehabilitation Employing Immersive User Interfaces in 3D Virtual Environment

Stroke is a disease with very high socio-economic impact. In average, the healthcare expenditure cost for Strokes across different countries in Europe and USA exceeds 3% of their entire healthcare expenditure, including inpatient treatments, outpatient hospital visits and long-term rehabilitation and care. Therefore, there is an urgent need for devising an effective long-term care and rehabilitation strategy for stroke patients, which would actively involve patients in the rehabilitation process while minimizing costly human support. This paper reports on the ongoing developments of the serious gaming approach to an integrated rehabilitation training for post-stroke patients employing the Unity3D virtual reality environment combined with a hybrid of advanced media technologies and immersive user interfaces. The proposed approach empowers the patients and their caretakers for effective application of rehabilitation protocols in their home settings, while leading physicians are enabled to supervise the progress of the rehabilitation (and intervene if needed) through the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) system. The increased rehabilitation speed and ability to perform training at home directly improves quality of life of patients. The work described herein has been performed in the “StrokeBack” project co-funded by the European Commission under the Framework 7 Program in the ICT domain