From Physiotherapy Goals to Procedurally Generated Games

Efforts to integrate serious games into physiotherapy have gained widespread traction, offering benefits such as enhanced engagement, direct feedback, objective progress monitoring, personalization, and more. However, fully embedding serious games into treatment and care pathways remains challenging. A major barrier is the difficulty physiotherapists face when setting up these games with respect to time, complexity, and personalization. Solving this is difficult - games that are simple to set up often offer fewer personalization options, while those that allow fine-grained customization require more complex settings.
Physiotherapists have asked us how the use of games can be made less laborious. We aim to tackle this by procedural generation: designing a system that easily creates a recommended serious-game-based therapy session from therapy goals defined by the therapist. The games will be configured automatically with the optimal settings needed for a patient to reach the defined goals, and the therapist can approve or edit the proposed plan. We propose to achieve this by 1) creating a rule-based system that interprets therapy goals into behavioral variables, 2) employing a procedural generation framework that uses these variables to create tailored in-game content for a suite of compatible serious games, and 3) employ minimal-setup sensing technologies that maintain high accuracy in patient movement tracking.
The result is a proof-of-concept serious game platform and recommendations for its future implementation in practice. The system will be designed and tested in collaboration with therapists and patients using a user-centric, iterative approach. Balance impairments are prevalent in a wide range of patient groups; therefore, the project will focus specifically on the use-case of dynamic balance in rehabilitation. Ultimately, this system aims to encourage consistent use of serious games in therapy and enhance efficiency, enabling therapists to supervise multiple patients with individualized game-based therapy plans simultaneously.