Tele-Rehabilitation platform ePHoRt as Serious Game: Usability evaluation

In recent years, the development of serious games is growing among the different application fields, especially in education. Nevertheless, the concept of learning through a game could be applied even in fields like Tele-Rehabilitation, where the patient could perform a rehabilitation routine in a motivating way due to improve its performance without the need of a doctor’s presence. ePHoRt is a platform developed by our team that allows hip surgery patients to perform their hip movement exercises effectively at home. At the same time, the platform allowed data collection useful for the physiotherapist in order to evaluate patient’s progress. One of the main features in this setting is that the user can personalize their avatar, objects and scenes that interact directly with different therapeutic exercises. At the same time, the platform includes several modules helping the physiotherapist and the patient to be informed about relative pain in the various parts of the body. The aim of this work is presenting the results of the usability evaluation in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the final users related with the serious game module in the ePHoRt web application. In order to perform this evaluation, several instruments are applied such as: IBM Questionnaire for the Satisfaction of the User Interface (IBM-CSUQ) and Microsoft’s Reaction Cards model. The results indicate that users rate serious games positively.