Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Glasgow School of Art
Virtual Reality and Serious Games in Healthcare
This chapter was a result of the NI Chest Heart and Stroke Association funded project "Virtual reality and rehabilitation of the upper limb after stroke" (award £118k) and the NHS Trust and Stroke Association funded SMART project. It provided a theoretical and practical framework for application of Virtual Reality games in healthcare. The serious games described are one of the few pioneer projects on VR and post stroke rehabilitation, and it influenced and informed many later research. The project has won the Northern Ireland Healthcare Award for the excellence and quality of the work. BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4292026.stm We discussed applications of emerging VR and games technologies in the healthcare sector, particularly, physical therapy for motor rehabilitation. We investigated recent advances and key concepts in games technology, including dynamic simulation, flow theory, adaptive games, and their possible implementation in health games. Various serious games are described and our experiments of using VR games for stroke rehabilitation are highlighted to showcase the benefits and impacts of these technologies to conventional clinic practice. The research has led to later publications inc. 6 books: Virtual & Augmented Reality in Healthcare. Springer (2013), Special issue on Serious Games Development and Applications. Entertainment Computing, 2(2), Elsevier (2011), Serious Games and Edutainment Applications. Springer (2011), Serious Games Development and Applications in Springer LNCS 8101, (2013), LNCS 7528 (2012) and LNCS 6944 (2011); and it also led to the establishment of the annual International Conference on Serious Games Development & Applications (www.sgda-conf.org). The conference has been held at Derby (2010), Lisbon (2011), Bremen (2012), and Trondheim (2013). It is endorsed by Springer, the European GALA Network of Excellence in Serious Games, SINTEF, FP7 TARGET Project, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Glasgow School of Art, University of Bremen, Technical University of Lisbon, and many prestigious European partners.
