A Review on Serious Games for Exercise Rehabilitation
This is an incremental review paper that synthesizes existing research to guide the design and development of serious games for improving exercise rehabilitation adherence in disabled and sub-healthy populations.
The paper addresses the lack of systematic summaries of serious games for exercise rehabilitation by reviewing their development, classifying them based on interaction modes and user groups, and analyzing studies from the past decade to provide design suggestions and future research directions.
Disability is an important factor affecting todays society. At the same time, more and more sub-healthy people are sick due to reduced body functions and cognitive functions. Exercise rehabilitation is a kind of physical therapy, which can recover the motor ability, cognitive ability, and mental state of them through exercise. But the traditional exercise rehabilitation has some drawbacks so that people who need exercise rehabilitation cannot stick to it. Therefore, many researchers improved the drawbacks of traditional exercise rehabilitation by serious games for exercise rehabilitation. Although there were abundant achievements in the games, its relevant technologies and representative games are not be summarized systematically. To fill this gap, we introduced the significance of the convergence of exercise rehabilitation and serious games. Then, our paper sorted out the development of the games based on interaction mode between games and players. Besides, we analyzed the characteristics of different user groups and the specific functions of the games corresponding to them, and gave our classification based on this. Based on the classification, we reviewed related studies of the games in the past decade years and gave some suggestions on game design and development. Finally, we proposed serval research directions worth studying about the games technology development, functional design and social popularization.