Recovering from a traumatic incident (e.g, a stroke) implies rigorous and demanding therapies to ensure recovery of the lost capabilities. Due to the lack of short-term visible results, stroke patients tend to lose interest in their recovery process and frequently do not follow their therapists’ suggestions to continue performing their training at home, between physiotherapy sessions. This article explores the extent to which common computer games or specifically crafted games can serve as a rehabilitation practice, but also how conventional therapeutic devices might be transformed to be incorporated into games. Furthermore, we propose a platform that follows the opportunity of creating serious games that are designed for stroke patients with reduced upper limb mobility while following the same principles of common therapeutic procedures. This platform was carefully built with the purpose of allowing patients to comply tele-rehabilitation and promoting the execution of the recommended training at home. Following these ideas, we integrated two carefully designed games that have been tested and validated in our previous works, and we added a top-layer characterized by an online back-end application for therapists that allows them to observe their patients’ progress over time and draw different conclusions.

Conventional motor rehabilitation therapies followed by stroke survivors during their recovery process, are typically intense and involve numerous repetitions of task-specific recommended exercises. However, due to the lack of short-term or immediate results, patients tend to lose motivation on the rehabilitation process, and on performing the therapist recommended exercises at home between sessions. The work described in this article proposes to engage the patients with the therapeutic exercises by transforming the latter into specially designed serious games. After an initial evaluation by therapists, a pilot study was conducted on a rehabilitation clinic that showed that this system is adequate for about 75% of the clinical cases treated. The proposed game was globally well-accepted by patients, showing to be motivational and engaging. These promising results lead us to believe that immersive-based games can indeed be a valuable aid for motor rehabilitation therapies.

Post-stroke rehabilitation should start as soon as possible, once the patient’s condition is considered stable. As rehabilitation must be intensive and repetitive, this can lead to problems with patient motivation and engagement. This paper proposes an immersive tool that intends to aid the traditional motor rehabilitation therapies, in order to both motivate and encourage the patients to perform therapeutic exercises, by having them distracted from their handicaps. Since different people have different needs, the game dynamically adapts to the user, by increasing or decreasing its level of challenge. Following the proposed solution principles a serious game was implemented and evaluated with positive results.

Vestibular impairment is often mistaken for just dizziness. Diagnosis and treatment, starting as soon as possible and repeated several times, are essential for returning to a normal life. However, it is a long process in which patients tend to get tired and bored with the exercises they have to perform and eventually lose interest in doing them. There are three fundamental exercises for this treatment: horizontal movements, vertical movements, and diagonal movements. These exercises are to be performed with head movements, accompanied with gaze stabilization techniques. This paper focus on the development of Virtual Reality Serious Games that can be played at home with a smartphone and a virtual reality headset, simulating the exercises recommended by therapists. Therefore, it becomes possible to provide patients a helpful strategy to perform the required activities while having fun at the same time. Through the means of the smartphone's sensors to detect the person's movements, users can play the three task-oriented games that were specifically developed to simulate each exercise mentioned. Finally, all the information regarding the user's gameplay is uploaded to a backoffice system, which enables therapists to track and analyze patients’ progress over time.

This article describes a demonstration of an ongoing research work that explores the extents of how immersive systems may support serious games development for post-stroke upper limb rehabilitation. Beyond the entertainment that is expected from games, the focus goes towards the exploitation of embodiment that should contribute to reinforce the patient engagement, what is known to contribute to the faster and deeper recovery, but also the sensory stimulation that is crucial to the development of new neural pathways.