Physical therapy is not most people’s idea of a fun time. It often pushes one just beyond their comfort zone in their abilities and seeing visible results can take a while. But what if the therapy session was an engaging interactive exergames in rehab, providing interactive fitness instant feedback to motivate the user to continue to push themselves?
Fitness-Gaming.com describes a couple of these exergame product – Riablo developed by CoRehab & tWall. Both of these are designed to do exactly that.
Here’s their description of the tWall in therapy:
“The twall®PLUS uses interactive fitness and fitness technology to allow patients to train special movement sequences and offers a playful approach to therapy while simultaneously challenging patients’ reaction time, perception and decision-making. The interactive reaction wall can be easily adapted to meet the needs of patients with different physical and mental impairments.”
And their take on the Riablo:
“Riablo, an interactive therapy solution developed by CoRehab, is a rehabilitation tool that delivers functional exercises and tests for orthopaedic patients and athletes recovering from sports injuries. The game-based rehabilitation system offers engaging therapeutic exercises, stimulates the proprioceptive system, and uses audio and visual feedback to motivate patients to stick with their neuromuscular training.
Riablo uses inertial sensors to accurately measure body movements and track patients’ performance in real time. A web application allows therapists to create exercise plans and control the reports generated by the software once the patient has completed the exercises. Therapy plans are customised for each patient and can include a wide range of exercises. Riablo also has a home care edition that allows patients to perform the exercises at home.”
Adding fitness gaming and fitness technology to physical rehab will help the patients to focus and find extrinsic motivation to improve their therapy.