Social Integration of Stroke Patients through the Multiplayer Rehabilitation Gaming System

Stroke is a leading cause of serious long-term disability in adults (Go et al, 2013). The impact of stroke induced impairments goes beyond the mere loss of motor abilities. The psychosocial implications caused by changes in performance of the activities of daily living have to be considered in modern rehabilitation processes since they do influence the potential outcome. From the perspective of traditional rehabilitation it is difficult to directly address these social factors. Here we propose to capitalize on a rising trend in rehabilitation to deploy virtual reality environments in order to overcome this limitation. By creating a multiplayer game that enhances performance of the patient through an adaptive mapping methodology, we compensate for motor impairments and allow the patient to interact with other participants on an equal level. We propose that this approach influences psychosocial dynamics as it changes the participant’s mutual perception. We conducted a psychosocial study to gain insight into the patients’ social environment and tested the system in two at home experiments. The results suggest that our system is able to equalize a healthy and disabled player and benefits the social interaction.