A Collaborative Rehabilitation-Exercise Serious Game for People with Stroke and their Caregivers: A Pilot Study

TL;DR

This pilot study introduces a collaborative serious game designed to support stroke rehabilitation and caregiver exercise, showing promising trends in motivation and emotional engagement with exercise-based input devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel collaborative serious game that simultaneously supports stroke therapy and caregiver exercise, incorporating exercise-based input to enhance user experience.

Findings

Interest scores trended higher with pedal input for caregivers.

Positive affect and competence scores trended higher with pedal use for stroke patients.

Trends suggest exercise devices may improve motivation and emotional engagement.

Abstract

Motivation to perform movement therapy and caregiver burnout are major challenges to post-stroke life. Serious games have been shown to support therapeutic tasks in people with stroke, but there are few activities that simultaneously support informal caregiver health, which is also impacted post-stroke. Here, we present a collaborative, mutually beneficial, serious game designed to support therapy for persons with stroke and also exercise for their informal caregivers. One player performs rehabilitative wrist movements - useful to people with stroke - and the other performs a seated march exercise - useful to informal caregivers - via pedals or a keyboard to control their avatar. We present a pilot study with 6 healthy dyads to evaluate how exercise-based input of one player, the Pseudo Caregiver (PCG), impacts motivation and emotional experience in both the PCG and Pseudo Person with Stroke (PPS). While not statistically significant, we find that PCGs Interest subscale scores trended higher when using a pedal (the exercised-based input) compared to a keyboard, regardless of game play mode. PPSs' positive affect scale scores and Competence subscale scores trended higher when their partner played collaboratively with a pedal compared to a keyboard. These trends encourage future work toward incorporating an exercise-based device, such as a pedal, to enhance the emotional and motivational experience of rehabilitative serious games for people with different movement ability levels.