September 2013

Videogames for physical rehabilitation

For my Masters dissertation as part of the Evolutionary & Adaptive Systems degree at Sussex I conducted research into the use of motion controlled videogames for physical rehabilitation. There has been a lot of interest in this field recently, however I found that the games produced so far typically have not been designed by games professionals and are consequently low on the fun factor.

As a starting step towards remedying this, I performed an experiment investigating the effect of player engagement on body movement: Can changing the type or level of player engagement lead to different types of body movement? If so, then a well designed rehabilitation game could manipulate a patient’s physical movements simply by virtue of them being immersed in the game.

The experiment was achieved using the Microsoft Kinect hardware and built in Unity.

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