Rehabilitation games for juvenile rheumatic disease

One issue of the standard physical therapy used in the rehabilitation process is that patients tend to have problems in performing it regularly, due to the tediousness of repeating simple exercises. Thus it is important to find alternative ways of making physical therapy that would encourage patients to keep exercising. This thesis concerns the development of a set of rehabilitation games for children affected by Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. Focusing on the wrist rehabilitation we designed a set of four games. We diversified our gaming offer designing different kind of games in order to appeal a wider range of people. For the design of the games we used the iterative design approach, that is a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing and refining our games. The main goal was to design games that would entertain the patients encouraging them to play and so to perform their exercise, preventing them from quitting the physical therapy. We also designed some features that would help the therapists in analyzing the patients’ performances and progress and give some useful information about possible improvements in the therapy. With the help of a team of therapists and patients from Clinica Pediatrica G. e D. De Marchi we performed a set of experimental sessions in order to validate our designs and to analyze how the patients interacted and adapted to the games. Feedbacks were good from both the patients, who enjoyed playing the games, and the therapists, who were satisfied with the features that we designed and with the patients’ response to the games.