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New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments

The work presented here suggests new ways to tackle exergames for physical rehabilitation and to improve the players’ immersion and involvement. The primary (but not exclusive) purpose is to increase the motivation of children and adolescents with severe physical impairments, for doing their require...

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Autores principales: Eckert, Martina, Gómez-Martinho, Ignacio, Meneses, Juan, Martínez, José-Fernán
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5336067/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28208682
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17020354
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author Eckert, Martina
Gómez-Martinho, Ignacio
Meneses, Juan
Martínez, José-Fernán
author_facet Eckert, Martina
Gómez-Martinho, Ignacio
Meneses, Juan
Martínez, José-Fernán
author_sort Eckert, Martina
collection PubMed
description The work presented here suggests new ways to tackle exergames for physical rehabilitation and to improve the players’ immersion and involvement. The primary (but not exclusive) purpose is to increase the motivation of children and adolescents with severe physical impairments, for doing their required exercises while playing. The proposed gaming environment is based on the Kinect sensor and the Blender Game Engine. A middleware has been implemented that efficiently transmits the data from the sensor to the game. Inside the game, different newly proposed mechanisms have been developed to distinguish pure exercise-gestures from other movements used to control the game (e.g., opening a menu). The main contribution is the amplification of weak movements, which allows the physically impaired to have similar gaming experiences as the average population. To test the feasibility of the proposed methods, four mini-games were implemented and tested by a group of 11 volunteers with different disabilities, most of them bound to a wheelchair. Their performance has also been compared to that of a healthy control group. Results are generally positive and motivating, although there is much to do to improve the functionalities. There is a major demand for applications that help to include disabled people in society and to improve their life conditions. This work will contribute towards providing them with more fun during exercise.
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spelling pubmed-53360672017-03-16 New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments Eckert, Martina Gómez-Martinho, Ignacio Meneses, Juan Martínez, José-Fernán Sensors (Basel) Article The work presented here suggests new ways to tackle exergames for physical rehabilitation and to improve the players’ immersion and involvement. The primary (but not exclusive) purpose is to increase the motivation of children and adolescents with severe physical impairments, for doing their required exercises while playing. The proposed gaming environment is based on the Kinect sensor and the Blender Game Engine. A middleware has been implemented that efficiently transmits the data from the sensor to the game. Inside the game, different newly proposed mechanisms have been developed to distinguish pure exercise-gestures from other movements used to control the game (e.g., opening a menu). The main contribution is the amplification of weak movements, which allows the physically impaired to have similar gaming experiences as the average population. To test the feasibility of the proposed methods, four mini-games were implemented and tested by a group of 11 volunteers with different disabilities, most of them bound to a wheelchair. Their performance has also been compared to that of a healthy control group. Results are generally positive and motivating, although there is much to do to improve the functionalities. There is a major demand for applications that help to include disabled people in society and to improve their life conditions. This work will contribute towards providing them with more fun during exercise. MDPI 2017-02-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5336067/ /pubmed/28208682 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17020354 Text en © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Eckert, Martina
Gómez-Martinho, Ignacio
Meneses, Juan
Martínez, José-Fernán
New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title_full New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title_fullStr New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title_full_unstemmed New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title_short New Approaches to Exciting Exergame-Experiences for People with Motor Function Impairments
title_sort new approaches to exciting exergame-experiences for people with motor function impairments
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5336067/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28208682
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s17020354
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