Chronic pain rehabilitation with a serious game using multimodal input

Abstract

Rehabilitation for chronic pain follows a multidisciplinary approach, which despite the effort, often lacks the long term success and patients often fail to translate the skills learned in therapy to every day life. Serious games are hypothesized to support patients to self manage their complaints and keep training their physical functions by themselves, especially, when the game is controlled by the patient's own body performance. In this paper we present the implementation of a system providing multimodal input, including our own full body motion capture system, a low cost motion capture system (Microsoft Kinect) and biosignal acquisition devices to a game engine. In addition, a workflow has been established, that enables the use of the acquired multimodal data for serious games in a medical environment. Finally, a serious game has been implemented, targeting rehabilitation of patients with chronic pain of the lower back and neck. The focus of this work is on the multimodal input and how it is used in a game to support rehabilitation of chronic pain patients. A brief comparison of a marker-based full body MoCap system and Microsoft's Kinect is included. Preliminary results of tests currently underway are provided.

Go-with-the-Flow: Tracking, Analysis and Sonification of Movement and Breathing to Build Confidence in Activity Despite Chronic Pain

“…In CP rehabilitation, activity is built by setting baselines that are manageable even on "bad pain" days with small increments as physical fitness increases, without increasing average pain. Unfortunately, current physical rehabilitation technology, such as the serious game by Schönauer et al (2011), does not allow for slow progress common in people with CP, or setbacks, increased anxiety, or low mood, all of which risk discouragement and abandonment of rehabilitation (Harding & Williams, 1995). Although these psychological factors are considered in technology for meditation, little attention has been paid to physical activity.…”

“…Recent work has addressed some of these shortcomings using low-cost full-body game technology with motion tracking capabilities to facilitate physical activity in CP (Jansen-Kosterink et al, 2013;Schönauer et al, 2011). The model used by these technologies is imported from technology for physical rehabilitation of other conditions (e.g., stroke), and uses sensing technology to introduce fun and provide rewards to reduce attention to pain.…”

“…Physical progress is the only measure of efficacy embedded and driving the design and the form of support provided during physical rehabilitation in CP (Jansen-Kosterink et al, 2013;Schönauer, Pintaric, Kaufmann, Jansen-Kosterink, & Vollenbroek-Hutten, 2011). In addition, transfer to everyday functioning, when addressed, is limited to simulated real-life activities (Paraskevopoulos et al, 2014) in games or virtual reality environments.…”

Adoption and Appropriation: A Design Process from HCI Research at a Brazilian Neurological Hospital

“…Recently, many studies, such as [2,3,11], have been carried out for finding ICT, and WIMP based solutions especially, within hospital settings with many different objectives, like: improving communication processes among hospital staff, providing more accurate diagnostic tools and treatments, assist in therapy processes, increase patient's medication adherence, and others. These efforts are categorized in the e-Health concept encompassing various initiatives to use these technologies to improve health processes.…”

A Game-Based Training Approach to Enhance Human Hand Motor Learning and Control Abilities

“…Learning to apply the correct amount of pressure plays a significant role in providing the correct diagnosis and also in patient comfort; a too light touch may miss out on important physiological phenomena and a too heavy touch may cause significant patient discomfort further compounding potential diagnosis issues. While a number of novel input technologies beyond the traditional have recently begun to be applied to serious games [9,10,11,12] no serious game, to the best of our knowledge, has targeted the correct application of pressure as its main goal. A study based on two groups composed of general public participants, one group that played the game and a control group demonstrates that there is reason to believe that such a serious game can help improve pressure sensitivity in individuals.…”