Recommendations for Games to Increase Patient Motivation During Upper Limb Amputee Rehabilitation

Abstract

Videogame based approaches are a motivating way to increase entertainment for upper limb amputees during neuromuscular rehabilitation training. Thereby myoelectric signals needed to control the prosthesis are intuitively trained and the functional gain of the prosthesis is increased. This study compares the intrinsic motivation between upper limb amputees and age and gender matched able-bodied participants after playing different videogames. Participants had to fill in two questionnaires in order to evaluate their attitude regarding videogame based rehabilitation and their intrinsic motivation. Results show higher investment of patients during the games and give a suggestion of what the ideal game for neuromuscular prosthetic control training might look like.