Reha@Stroke - A Mobile Application to Support People Suffering from a Stroke Through Their Rehabilitation

Stroke is affecting a lot of people worldwide through different age groups. Although it is affecting more older people, stroke within younger people is on the rise and is a big problem for the affected. They have to undergo rehabilitation to hopefully regain lost abilities, which poses a time consuming and monotonous process. This needs to be done together with a therapist and contains a lot of different exercises for different parts of the body. This is where serious gaming emerged within the last few years to support this process by including gaming aspects to increase motivation and compliance of the patients. But there are a lot of different serious games available for supporting stroke patients and normally these games need additional devices for controlling the game. Therefore, the authors propose a new and easy to use solution of a serious game, which is just using the integrated sensors of a mobile device. This game was created together with a therapist with feedback from 13 of his patients throughout an user centred design process. It poses a novel approach with easy to understand levels for movement, gesture and touch exercises, which contain different difficulty levels to fit the individual needs of the patients.