# Probe: A Framework for Serious Games in Telecrabilitation
## 5 Conclusions  
Telerehabilitation systems have been widely used in the recent years, showing their crucial importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the field of telerehabilitation, serious games play an important role since they can foster user engagement and hence, enhance rehabilitation outcomes. However, telerehabilitation systems based on serious games are often suited for specific patient conditions, so implementing new games or even customizing existing ones is resource demanding and requires software development skills. Moreover, several libraries exist to ease game development, but they lack in offering advanced user interaction methods, such as those that use computer vision algorithms or eye-tracking devices.  
In this paper, we presented Proteo: an open source, modular framework for developing serious games from scratch, providing a high-level interface for serious game development and customization. Proteo provides many built-in modules to cover most common features that a serious game may need, such as client/server communication, user management, data management, advanced human-computer interaction, computer vision, or deep learning techniques.  
Proteo has proven to be a useful tool to develop serious games for telerehabilitation and has been well accepted both by the therapists and by the users we involved in the evaluation of suitability questionnaire.  
As for future work, we plan to conduct more extensive tests involving a larger group of therapists and rehabilitation researchers. Moreover, we plan to use Proteo in structured telerehabilitation programs involving people with disabilities.  
Another step is to explore other varieties of games, such as complex task units (such as with math problems). Finally, we consider it important to understand if the obtained results will be similar with larger group sizes and will also investigate the applicability of Proteo to different settings such as in families, schools, and hospitals.  
Supplementary Materials: Proteeo is available on GitHub under the MIT License at [[https://massimobernava.github.io/proteo/](https://massimobernava.github.io/proteo/)]([https://massimobernava.github.io/proteo/](https://massimobernava.github.io/proteo/)), accessed on 11 June 2021.  
Conceptualization, G.B. and A.N.; methodology, G.B., A.N., R.A.F. and G.I.; software, G.B.; validation, G.B., A.N., R.A.F. and G.I.; writing--original draft preparation, G.B., A.N., R.A.F. and T.C.; writing--review and editing, A.N., G.B., R.A.F. and T.C.; visualization, G.B. and A.N.; All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research received no external funding.  
Ethical review and approval were waived for this study, because the authors did not involve patients in a telerehabilitation program. In this study only therapists and researchers were involved to assess the suitability of the presented software.  
Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.  
Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: [[https://github.com/massimobernava/proteo/tree/master/data](https://github.com/massimobernava/proteo/tree/master/data)]([https://github.com/massimobernava/proteo/tree/master/data](https://github.com/massimobernava/proteo/tree/master/data)) accessed on 11 May 2021.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.