George Wilson

Shabnam Sadeghi Esfahlani, Silvia Cirstea, Alireza Sanaei et al.

Rehabilitation robotics combined with video game technology provides a means of assisting in the rehabilitation of patients with neuromuscular disorders by performing various facilitation movements. The current work presents ReHabGame, a serious game using a fusion of implemented technologies that can be easily used by patients and therapists to assess and enhance sensorimotor performance and also increase the activities in the daily lives of patients. The game allows a player to control avatar movements through a Kinect Xbox, Myo armband and rudder foot pedal, and involves a series of reach-grasp-collect tasks whose difficulty levels are learnt by a fuzzy interface. The orientation, angular velocity, head and spine tilts and other data generated by the player are monitored and saved, whilst the task completion is calculated by solving an inverse kinematics algorithm which orientates the upper limb joints of the avatar. The different values in upper body quantities of movement provide fuzzy input from which crisp output is determined and used to generate an appropriate subsequent rehabilitation game level. The system can thus provide personalised, autonomously-learnt rehabilitation programmes for patients with neuromuscular disorders with superior predictions to guide the development of improved clinical protocols compared to traditional theraputic activities.

Shabnam Sadeghi Esfahlani, George Wilson

Computational Intelligence (CI) in computer games plays an important role that could simulate various aspects of real-life problems. CI in real-time decision-making games can provide a platform for the examination of tree search algorithms. In this paper, we present a rehabilitation serious game (ReHabgame) in which the Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm is utilized. The game is designed to combat the physical impairment of post-stroke/brain injury casualties in order to improve upper limb movement. Through the process of ReHabgame the player chooses paths via upper limb according to his/her movement ability to reach virtual goal objects. The system adjusts the difficulty level of the game based on the player's quality of activity through MCTS. It learns from the movements made by a player and generates further subsequent objects for collection. The system collects orientation, muscle and joint activity data and utilizes them to make decisions. Players data are collected through Kinect Xbox One and Myo Armband. The results show the effectiveness of the MCTS in the ReHabgame that progresses from highly achievable paths to the less achievable ones, thus configuring and personalizing the rehabilitation process.