Design and evaluation of human-friendly hand-held gaming interface for robot-assisted intuitive telerehabilitation

Abstract

A testbed gaming interface operated through a hand-held mobile device is designed and developed for robot-assisted telerehabilitation. In the developed gaming interface, a patient needs to wear sensors (position and force/pressure sensors) at different body parts that measure kinematics and kinetics data during rehabilitation practices through some game-like activities. The extent of rehabilitation progress is reflected through the magnitudes, patterns and expressions (such as the graphical expressions) of the kinematics and kinetics data. To do so, the kinematics and kinetics raw data are processed in real-time, expressed in different ways and displayed through the interface (e.g., mobile phone) held in the patient’s hand. The patient can monitor the rehabilitation progress through the graphical data expressions via the interface, interact with the display device and the rehabilitation results, and communicate the results to the healthcare providers and the patient community. To make the gaming interface human-friendly, prior knowledge of human factors involved in the interface is considered when the interface is designed. The assessment method for each human factor is developed, and the interface is implemented and evaluated in a pilot study. The evaluation results show that the hand-held gaming interface designed and developed through addressing the human factors is effective to satisfy the human factor requirements in the human-device interaction, and to make the interaction more human-friendly. The results can be used to optimize and benchmark the performance of the interface and of the rehabilitation system.