Specifying How to Motivate People in Computer Assisted Rehabilitation

The growing interest in computer assisted rehabilitation to alleviate the lack of enough facilities and specialists to cope with current demand for rehabilitation, especially related to the ageing of population, has pushed forward challenges and innovation related to the design and development of such systems. One of the aspects present in rehabilitation is motivation. Motivation is not essential in rehabilitation, but has been proven a useful factor to increase the efficiency of a rehabilitation process. In this paper we discuss the concept of motivation by providing a model that aims at supporting the design of the characteristics of motivation. Influence Awareness model is introduced as a vehicle to provide the patient with the information required to influence her behavior to improve her motivation towards rehabilitation in a computer assisted environment. Moreover, this Influence Awareness is integrated into a modelling language that enables the specification of the tasks to be accomplished during rehabilitation. Lastly, these concepts are exemplified in a case study.