The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A serious game aiding rehabilitation in the context of Subacromial Impingement Syndrome

Serious games can help to improve efficacy of motor rehabilitation especially in a home environment. We introduce "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", a serious game improving strength and mobility of the shoulder area targeting support of supervised physiotherapy. It proposes a customizable environment for supplementary exercises in the context of rehabilitation for a one-sided Shoulder-Impingement-Syndrome. We introduce the medical background of the shoulder impingement syndrome, how the game aims to improve the health status of the patients through several options of exercises and how these exercises are embedded into the flow of game play. We will further explain how motivational factors are implemented and which additional factors were relevant in the design process. As the game makes use of motion tracking for input, we utilized Microsoft Kinect as a low-cost IO device suitable for a home-environment use case.