5. Motivating Rehabilitation Through Competitive Gaming

This chapter presents the games and animations developed for the “StrokeBack” project. After a detailed introduction—which is quite a detailed overview of the current available literature—showing the multimedia and virtual reality-based games and rehabilitation systems made all over the world. The second chapter deals with the presentation of the development environment of the “StrokeBack” projects’ games. This is followed by the third chapter which describes in detail the games themselves from the initial games’ ideas and from the first developing steps to the final version of the games. Finally, from the suggested several games only three games (Break the Bricks, Birdie, and Gardener) have been installed into the system. The goal of these games is to make it possible for the patients to practice at home. The patients have exercised various repetitive movements. The fourth part of this chapter presents the redesign of the games based on the therapists’ and patients’ opinions. The description of the level editors is in the fifth part of the chapter. The sixth section presents the motivation and teaching animations. Motivational animations were necessary for the patients to have a short rest between the completion of a level and stepping to the next level of the game. The teaching animations teach the clients the proper movements that he/she must exercise both during the game and music therapy. Particular transactions to the games and the animation should have a great motivating effect.