Serious Games for Training Myoelectric Prostheses through Multi-Contact Devices

Abstract

In the medical context, designing and developing myoelectric prostheses has made it possible for patients to regain mobility lost due to amputations; however, their use requires intensive training. Serious games through multi-touch devices can serve as a complement to the activities carried out during face-to-face sessions with occupational therapists and physiotherapists, as a useful resource to engage patients, especially children, and make them enjoy training. In this paper, we describe our work to support the training of myoelectric prostheses through digital serious games. Firstly, we studied the needs of children with myoelectric prostheses and the way they perform rehabilitation. Secondly, we designed specific games to support training accordingly. Thirdly, we developed a system able to generate variations of these games dynamically, adapting the elements at each round to the needs and progress of each child. The interfaces are simple, friendly, and based on tablets to favor autonomy. Finally, we assessed the potential of the use of these games for rehabilitation. Specialists in Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Medicine and Special Education collaborated as experts; they agreed that SilverTouch is good for myoelectric prosthetic training and confirmed its potential to be widely used in this context.

Users’ and therapists’ perspectives on the design of a virtual reality environment to train prosthesis control: a narrative review and focus group study

“…The software related factors are the logging of activities and usage and the privacy of the application which might be important when the system is used at home and the information is sent to a therapist (Gaballa et al, 2022;Woodward et al, 2017). Finally, the platform must be user friendly for the therapists (Garske, Dyson, Dupan, & Nazarpour, 2021; Woodward et al, 2017) and patients (Carro et al, 2022). The area of the environment might be important, as it should be large enough to move around in it (Blana et al, 2016).…”