Serious Games for Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Introduction: Stroke rehabilitation plays an important role in recovering the lifestyle of stroke survivors. However, current stroke rehabilitations are facing numerous issues that may delay the patients’ recovery progress. One of the main issues is the lack of patient interest in performing the rehabilitation redundant tasks for long periods of time. They tend to lose their interest quickly and get distracted easily during the rehabilitation sessions. Additional issues with stroke rehabilitation in hospitals include the high healthcare cost since the treatment is often managed on a one-to-one basis, the travel expenses on patients, and the insufficient capacity of hospitals comparing to the large number of stroke patients. Therefore, many stroke patients were encouraged to continue their rehabilitation therapy at home. Unfortunately, statistics reveals that only few number of stroke patients perform the rehabilitation therapy at home as advised by their therapists. Although existing research proved the engagement and effectiveness of nonimmersive virtual reality (VR) based rehabilitation systems, limited research is available on the applicability of fully-immersive VR-based rehabilitation systems.