Abstract
Stroke is the most common disease in the UK and leading cause of long-term disability. Whilst the long-term effects of a stroke differ between patients, motor deficits are extremely common, mostly caused by the damage and loss of neural pathways in the brain, and patients may re-learn the lost limb movements by building new neural pathways through repeated exercising to encourage a specific set of joint movements (Galeoto et al., Topics Stroke Rehab 26:236–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749357.2019.1574060, 2019). To overcome the limitation of therapists’ contact time, compensatory movements and motivation, and to provide guided therapy time for repeated physical movement exercise for training the body and brain, technological solutions exist on a spectrum from fully mechanical orthoses (e.g. custom fabricated orthoses), to fully virtual digital solutions (with an immersive head-mounted display).
This chapter focuses on virtual digital solutions, initially exploring the current issues in the independent usage of such solutions within the home, including safety, cost and support requirements amongst other concerns. Further, this chapter explores key theories of gamification and findings from a range of research projects to understand usefulness of virtual digital solutions for the purpose of stroke rehabilitation. This includes understanding the attractiveness of games for stroke patients, flexibility to adapt to a variety of requirements from different users, motivation provided through feedback of users’ performance during gameplay, managing the level of challenge within the game to maintain engagement and using high fidelity and immersive experiences provided by certain technologies (such as virtual reality (VR)) whilst understanding the limitations of current sensors and solutions. The lessons learnt from past studies and future expectations are also explored.
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Vyas, P., Harris, M.C., Brown, D.J., Shires, L. (2023). Games for Stroke Rehabilitation: An Overview. In: Brooks, E., Brown, D.J. (eds) Virtual Reality Games for Rehabilitation. Virtual Reality Technologies for Health and Clinical Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3371-7_1
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