A Feasibility Study of Tablet Games Rehabilitation for Patients with Stroke

• Main Authors: Ya-Hsuan Hung, 洪雅瑄
• Other Authors: Woei-Chyn Chu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36489463296092351315

博士 === 國立陽明大學 === 生物醫學工程學系 === 104 === Stroke is one of the most common causes of physical disability in industrialized nations. Approximately 33% to 66% of stroke survivors report persistent movement impairment of their upper extremity and are unable to use their affected arm in daily activities. Early, intensive, and repetitive rehabilitation exercises are crucial to the recovery of stroke survivors. Unfortunately, research shows that only one third of stroke patients actually perform recommended exercises at home, because of the repetitive and mundane nature of conventional rehabilitation exercises. Thus, to motivate stroke survivors to engage in monotonous rehabilitation is a significant issue in the therapy process. Game-based rehabilitation systems have the potential to encourage patients continuing rehabilitation exercises at home. Thus, there have been several earlier attempts to use console devices, such as Nintendo wii, Kinect, and tablets in stroke rehabilitation. However, these systems are still rarely adopted at patients’ places. Discovering and eliminating the obstacles in promoting game-based rehabilitation at home is therefore essential. For this purpose, we conducted a study to collect and analyze the opinions and expectations of stroke patients and clinical therapists. The study is composed of three topics: (i) Rehab-preference: interviews to both patients and therapists to understand the challenges and expectations on game-based rehabilitation systems, (ii) Rehab-compatibility: a gaming experiment with therapists to elaborate what commercial games are compatible with rehabilitation, and (iii) Rehab-usability: an experiment with both patients and able-bodied participants to compare the performance on three touchscreen tasks. Our surveys show that game-based rehabilitation systems can turn the rehabilitation exercises more appealing and provide personalized motivation for various stroke patients. Patients prefer to perform rehabilitation exercises with more diverse and fun games, and need cost-effective rehabilitation systems, which are often built on commodity hardware. Our study also sheds light on incorporating the existing design-for-fun games into rehabilitation system. We envision the results are helpful in developing a platform which enables rehab-compatible (i.e. existing, appropriately selected) games to be operated on commodity hardware and brings cost-effective rehabilitation systems to more and more patients’ home for long-term recovery. In the third survey showed that fundamental error of single-tap and long-press was the Android’s gesture recognizer incorrectly recognizing tap/long press as sliding due to patients’ unintended drifting. We propose “iAssist”, which adapts Android’s gesture recognizer settings for stroke patients to improve touching performance.