A Review on Serious Games for Exercise Rehabilitation

Disability is an important factor affecting todays society. At the same time, more and more sub-healthy people are sick due to reduced body functions and cognitive functions. Exercise rehabilitation is a kind of physical therapy, which can recover the motor ability, cognitive ability, and mental state of them through exercise. But the traditional exercise rehabilitation has some drawbacks so that people who need exercise rehabilitation cannot stick to it. Therefore, many researchers improved the drawbacks of traditional exercise rehabilitation by serious games for exercise rehabilitation. Although there were abundant achievements in the games, its relevant technologies and representative games are not be summarized systematically. To fill this gap, we introduced the significance of the convergence of exercise rehabilitation and serious games. Then, our paper sorted out the development of the games based on interaction mode between games and players. Besides, we analyzed the characteristics of different user groups and the specific functions of the games corresponding to them, and gave our classification based on this. Based on the classification, we reviewed related studies of the games in the past decade years and gave some suggestions on game design and development. Finally, we proposed serval research directions worth studying about the games technology development, functional design and social popularization.