Jcave: A 3D Interactive Game to Assist Home Physiotherapy Rehabilitation
This work addresses the challenge of improving adherence to physiotherapy in children through gamification, though it is incremental as it applies existing gamification and motion capture techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of making physiotherapy rehabilitation engaging for children by developing JCave, a 3D interactive game that uses motion capture and gesture recognition to assist upper limb exercises, resulting in a functional prototype designed for children aged 6-12.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of applying gamification approach on the physiotherapy rehabilitation. A new developing game called JCave was designed and developed for the prove of concept. The propose game target the children from six to twelve years of age who need physical therapy in their upper limbs. JCave is a finite and multilevel single-player 3D video game. The player's role is to collect jewels from a cave and increase his/her score by performing physical therapy exercises. The game uses Xbox360 Kinect as a motion capture camera to observe gestures and track the child. Automatic gesture recognition algorithms are implemented for elbow flexion-extension exercises and shoulder flexion, which are the active range of motion (AROM) exercises for both the right and left arms. The JCave game is implemented using Unity3D and Blender to design 3D model objects.