Serious games for assessment and training in post-stroke robotic upper-limb telerehabilitation

Research shows that better results in post-stroke rehabilitation are obtained when patients receive more intensive therapy. However, the increasing affected population and the limited healthcare resources prevent the provision of intense rehabilitation care. Thus, there is a need for a more autonomous and scalable care provision methods that can be transferred out of the clinic and into home environments. Serious games in combination with robotic rehabilitation can provide an affordable, engaging, and effective way to intensify treatment, both at the clinic and at home. Furthermore, they can offer quantitative assessment of motor performance, allowing individualized treatments and to keep the patient and their therapists informed about therapy progress. Towards this end, a set of games for assessment and training of upper-limb motor impairment after stroke with the ArmAssist is presented. A special effort has been made to design the assessment games in order to be able, not only to measure the effectiveness of the training, but also to compare the assessment results with the standard assessment scales used in the clinic. Feedback from usability testing of previous versions of the system has also been crucial for the final design. Preliminary results of an ongoing clinical testing are presented.