An Overview of Serious Games in Cognitive Rehabilitation
Serious Games (SG) are an emergent field of research focused on the use of games with other purposes than mere entertainment with applications in many diverse areas. Although the term SG is becoming more and more popular, there is no current definition of the concept. Zyda (2005) was the first author to give a definition of SGs as "a mental contest, played with a computer in accordance with specific rules, that uses entertainment to further government or corporate training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives" (p. 26) Michael Chen (2006) define SGs as "games that do not have entertainment, enjoyment or fun as their primary purpose" (p. 21) The authors classify SGs into a number of markets: military games, government games, educational games, corporate games, healthcare games, and political, religious and art games. Susi et al. gave an overview of SGs (Susi, 2005) Despite such classifications, many games could belong to more than one category and nowadays this concept is largely used in respect to computer games. The use of SG in rehabilitation has increased substantially over the past decade. By taking advantage of game technology in order to create more attractive user experiences and increasing playability, the environments and tasks simulated in the SG can be used to teach or train users in various situations (Rego, 2012) In particular, games applied in the field of neurorehabilitation are helping to improve the process of motor learning and recovery from incidents of stroke, traumatic brain injury, and other neuromuscular impairment by increasing user motivation during training (Perry, 2011) In this chapter we present a review of the state of the art and evolution of SG in cognitive rehabilitation, revealing how they can help in the process of rehabilitation, pointing several advantages of their use, presenting some relevant SG available, as well as technologies and platforms used to their development. Furthermore, it will be also addressed new ways of human interactions and several cases of success applied to cognitive rehabilitation in patients. Lastly, some research opportunities and open problems will be identified. An Overview of Serious Games in Cognitive Rehabilitation