Exploring serious games for stroke rehabilitation: a scoping review

Abstract

Aims and Objectives

Stroke is the main cause of long-term disability and happens mostly in the older population. Stroke affected patients experience either of the cognitive, visual or motor losses and recovery requires time and patience as they have to do physical exercises every day and at times repetitively. There are various types of stroke rehabilitation exercises focussing on technological solutions that include therapies performed using games. Motion-based games are popular in encouraging participants to perform repetitive tasks without being getting bored. Therefore, in this study, we have explored studies that included the use of games for stroke rehabilitation to understand the design principles and characteristics of the games used for these purposes.

Method

A number of medical respositories were searched for relevant articles in a window of 2008-2018. 18 studies were chosen for the scoping review depending on the inclusion criteria, and design principles used in these studies are analysed and evaluated.

Results and Conclusion

We present main findings from our review concerning the attributes of existing games for stroke rehabilitation such as meaningful play, handling of failures, emphasising challenge, and the value of feedback. We conclude with a list of design recommendations that future serious game developers can consider while designing interfaces for stroke patients.

Implications for Rehabilitation

• This review exhibits that the usage of gaming technologies is a very effective interactive mechanism for stroke based rehabilitation.

• Further our review also shows that serious games provide an avenue and opportunity for customized and highly contextualized gameplay

• Our review also suggests that effective features to incorporate into serious games for rehabilitation includes; facilitating challenge and recovery from errors.

Keywords:

• Stroke
• rehabilitation
• game design
• design guidelines
• gamification

Acknowledgement

The first author would like to acknowledge the academic development program (ADP) at Western Sydney University which provided the time and resources to carry out this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.