Background
Many rehabilitation clinics adopted serious games to support their physiotherapy sessions. Serious games can monitor and provide feedback on exercises and are expected to improve therapy and help professionals deal with more patients. However, there is little understanding of the impacts of serious games on the actual work of physiotherapists.
Objective
This study aimed to understand the impact of an electromyography-based serious game on the practical work of physiotherapists.
Methods
This study used observation sessions in an outpatient rehabilitation clinic that recently started using a serious game based on electromyography sensors. In total, 44 observation sessions were performed, involving 3 physiotherapists and 22 patients. Observation sessions were documented by audio recordings or fieldnotes and were analyzed for themes with thematic analysis.
Results
The findings of this study showed that physiotherapists played an important role in enabling the serious game to work. Physiotherapists briefed patients, calibrated the system, prescribed exercises, and supported patients while they played the serious game, all of which amounted to relevant labor.
Conclusions
The results of this work challenge the idea that serious games reduce the work of physiotherapists and call for an overall analysis of the different impacts a serious game can have. Adopting a serious game that creates more work can be entirely acceptable, provided the clinical outcomes or other advantages enabled by the serious game are strong; however, those impacts will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, this work motivates the technology development community to better investigate physiotherapists and their context, offering implications for technology design.
PurposeThis study assesses the effects of junior enterprises (JEs) on the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of engineering higher education students, compared to a group of social sciences students.Design/methodology/approachThis research analyses a sample of 132 students enrolled in engineering higher education courses in Portugal and Brazil, while 83 of the respondents being involved in a JE and 49 not. The authors compare this group to another group of 176 social sciences students from several higher education courses, while 93 being enrolled in JE and 83 not.FindingsThe results show that students enrolled in JEs show higher levels of entrepreneurial intention (EI), as well as their antecedents such as attitude towards the behaviour (ATB), perceived behavioural control (PBC) and social norms (SN) , and the impact of this extracurricular activity is higher on engineering students than on social sciences students. Also, country and gender differences were found in some variables.Research limitations/implicationsFurther studies are needed to confirm the results in a broader population and in other countries. Also, the study addressed attitudes and intentions but not actual behaviour due to the time lag problem. There is also the risk of self-reported bias on the answers due to social desirability bias, for example. Finally, because JEs have their own recruitment process, there is a possible “self-selection problem” of students who might have previously developed some of entrepreneurial attitudes and skills assessed by the questionnaire.Practical implicationsThe results have important implications for engineering higher education institutions. Despite many of them provide entrepreneurship training courses, they should also encourage students to join extracurricular activities or even create their own at their institution to complement their skills' development. Also, teachers should be encouraged to integrate these activities into their subjects, avoiding a major barrier to the participation in extracurricular activities which is the students' time constraints. Finally, participation in extracurricular activities can be promoted by institutions in many ways, such as allowing students to obtain academic credits or through supporting financially or logistically the organisations that promote these activities.Social implicationsThis study contributes to the discussion on how to promote the development of entrepreneurial competences in young people that soon will enter the labour market.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the discussions on the value of extracurricular activities, such as the enrolment in JEs, to the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and intention on the training of the next generation of engineers capable of facing future worlds' challenges.
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