Chronic Pain Rehabilitation with a Serious Game using Multimodal Input

Rehabilitation for chronic pain follows amultidisciplinary approach, which despite the effort, oftenlacks the long term success and patients often fail to translatethe skills learned in therapy to every day life. Serious gamesare hypothesized to support patients to self manage theircomplaints and keep training their physical functions bythemselves, especially, when the game is controlled by thepatient´s own body performance. In this paper we present theimplementation of a system providing multimodal input,including our own full body motion capture system, a low costmotion capture system (Microsoft Kinect) and biosignalacquisition devices to a game engine. In addition, a workflowhas been established, that enables the use of the acquiredmultimodal data for serious games in a medical environment.Finally, a serious game has been implemented, targetingrehabilitation of patients with chronic pain of the lower backand neck. The focus of this work is on the multimodal inputand how it is used in a game to support rehabilitation ofchronic pain patients. A brief comparison of a marker-basedfull body MoCap system and Microsoft´s Kinect is included.Preliminary results of tests currently underway are provided.