Jcave: A 3D Interactive Game to Assist Home Physiotherapy Rehabilitation

TL;DR

This paper introduces JCave, a 3D gamified physiotherapy game for children using Kinect, designed to motivate and assist upper limb rehabilitation through interactive exercises.

Contribution

The paper presents the design and development of JCave, a novel gamified platform utilizing Kinect for engaging pediatric physiotherapy exercises.

Findings

JCave effectively motivates children to perform rehabilitation exercises.

The game accurately tracks gestures for elbow and shoulder movements.

Preliminary tests show positive engagement and exercise compliance.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of applying gamification approach on the physiotherapy rehabilitation. A new developing game called JCave was designed and developed for the prove of concept. The propose game target the children from six to twelve years of age who need physical therapy in their upper limbs. JCave is a finite and multilevel single-player 3D video game. The player's role is to collect jewels from a cave and increase his/her score by performing physical therapy exercises. The game uses Xbox360 Kinect as a motion capture camera to observe gestures and track the child. Automatic gesture recognition algorithms are implemented for elbow flexion-extension exercises and shoulder flexion, which are the active range of motion (AROM) exercises for both the right and left arms. The JCave game is implemented using Unity3D and Blender to design 3D model objects.