Improving motivation in wrist rehabilitation therapies

Abstract

Rehabilitation encompasses a wide variety of activities aimed at reducing the impact of injuries and disabilities by applying different exercises. Frequently, such exercises are carried out at home as a repetition of the same movements or tasks to achieve both motor learning and the necessary cortical changes. Although this increases the patients’ available time for rehabilitation, it may also have some unpleasant side effects. That occurs because carrying out repetitive exercises in a more isolated environment may result in a boring activity that leads patients to give up their rehabilitation. Therefore, patients’ motivation should be considered an essential feature while designing rehabilitation exercises. In this paper, we present how we have faced this need by exploiting novel technology to guide patients in their rehabilitation process. It includes a game crafted to make recovery funny and useful, at the same time. The game and the use we made of the specific hardware follow the recommendations and good practices provided by medical experts.