Formative evaluation and preliminary validation of kinect open source stepping game

Abstract

Clinical adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) rehabilitation faces several hurdles [1]. Two of these are equipment costs and the VR interface. In order to address these hurdles, a stepping game was developed from the ground-up using simple source code - C# and WPF and the Microsoft Windows 7 (WinT) Operating System (OS). Using a managed-open-source perspective [2] and sharing the source code enables the rehabilitation community to customized their game for deployment on a desktop or laptop running the Win7 system while limiting costs. The game is built in the native Win7 environment and is coded for development by a beginner programmer. It also allows for the wider open-source developer community to take the programming and application further than would otherwise be possible. Game development, formative evaluation of the game interface, and validation of the kinematics are reported here.