A Serious Game for Training and Evaluating the Balance of Hemiparetic Stroke Patients

Abstract

Stroke is the major cause of disabilities in adults and the second major cause of deaths worldwide. People that survive a stroke present deficits that affect their functional capacities and require rehabilitation for long periods. The use of digital entertaining games has shown to be a helping ally to the rehabilitation process, despite its therapeutic limitations. An alternative to these limitations is the development of games and control interfaces targeted the needs of patients, the so called Serious Games. The aim of this paper is to present the development of a Serious Game for training and evaluation of balance in hemiparetic stroke patients. An integrated biomedical system was, which consists of a balance board with inertial sensors instrumentation and a computer system that runs the game. The aim of the game, called myBalance, is to direct a ball to a target position according to the board signals. Various parameters of the game can be adjusted to comply with patients’ limitations. The game has a scoring system that extracts metric information regarding patients’ performance during gaming. Preliminary results indicate that the system (board and game) can be easily used for training and evaluation of patients’ balance. It was also showed that the game can be used as a metric system for clinical studies. Future works include comparing game scores to standard clinical scales for balance.