Biomedical Control Interface for a Physical Rehabilitation Serious Game

The main objective of rehabilitation is to improve the patient functional capacities. Most rehabilitation processes can take a long period of time, which may induce patients to drop out of the treatment. Therefore, it is important to use new strategies to motivate patients for continuing their rehabilitation. This work presents the development of a biomedical system to be used as a control interface for a serious game in physical rehabilitation. The biomedical system allows the use of an electromyography, dynamometer or an inertial sensors based on an accelerometer and a gyroscope. The game was developed inspired in a tennis videogame called Pong and was designed based on the PBL (Points, Badges and LeaderBoard) strategy and adapted to have special features for rehabilitation. The aim of the game is to control a racket by using either EMG, dynamometry or the inertial sensor signals. The game is calibrated and adjusted according to patient limitations. The game performs scoring based on an empirical approach. Preliminary tests showed that the system meets the hardware and software requirements for use in rehabilitation according to the medical compliance for this type of device. Results showed that the dynamometry, EMG and accelerometry signals can easily be used to control the game interface.