Rehabilitation for Children while Playing with a Robotic Assistant in a Serious Game

Abstract

Traditional neuro-rehabilitation therapies are usually repetitive and lengthy, reducing motivation and adherence to the treatment and thus limiting the benefits for the patients. Moreover, exercises are usually not customizable for the patients, further increasing their disengagement with the treatment. The outcome is then a boring session day after day. This is more pronounced when the patient is a child. However, the execution of these repetitive movements is really needed, as it alters the properties of our neurons, including their pattern of connectivity. Correctly driven, this process finally allows to improve the neural functionality. The question is then: how can we improve the motivation and immersion of the patients into the therapy? We could try to convert the boring therapy into a funny one. This will help to the patients, but also to the practitioner. For this end, computer-assisted technologies have been extensively employed in the last years. Within this research field, this paper proposes to engage the child to the therapy by immersing her into an augmented reality scenario, where it will play several serious games. The adherence to the session will be further increased by incorporating a social robot as a playmate. This robot will be a personal trainer, that will perform the session in the real world with the patient. Additionally, the robot will be able to record the data for each session. This data could be subsequently used by the rehabilitation specialists for monitoring and/or adapting the therapy to the patient’s needs.