Gamifying Motor Rehabilitation Therapies: Challenges and Opportunities of Immersive Technologies Recovering from a traumatic incident (e.g, a stroke) implies rigorous and demanding therapies to ensure recovery of the lost capabilities. Due to the lack of shortterm visible results, stroke patients tend to lose interest in their recovery process and frequently do not follow their therapistsxe2x80x99 suggestions to continue performing their training at home, between physiotherapy sessions. This article explores the extent to which common computer games or specifically crafted games can serve as a rehabilitation practice, but also how conventional therapeutic devices might be transformed to be incorporated into games. Furthermore, we propose a platform that follows the opportunity of creating serious games that are designed for stroke patients with reduced upper limb mobility while following the same principles of common therapeutic procedures. This platform was carefully built with the purpose of allowing patients to comply telerehabilitation and promoting the execution of the recommended training at home. Following these ideas, we integrated two carefully designed games that have been tested and validated in our previous works, and we added a toplayer characterized by an online backend application for therapists that allows them to observe their patientsxe2x80x99 progress over time and draw different conclusions.

Investigating Human Factors in the HandHeld Gaming Interface of a Telerehabilitation Robotic System. Robotic devices can be used as effective tools to provide rehabilitation supports to stroke patients. Such robotic rehabilitation practices can replace therapists providing rehabilitation therapy to patients. Patients can independently practice rehabilitation with robotic rehabilitation devices for longer hours. These advantages are now motivating patients to use rehabilitation robots. However, contemporary rehabilitation practices are expensive, and patients need to travel to rehabilitation centers for rehabilitation, which is time consuming and burdensome. This is why, the concepts of telerehabilitation are becoming more and more popular where the patients can practice rehabilitation at homes, and the therapists can remotely monitor the rehabilitation practices and communicate with the patients if necessary. However, such rehabilitation practices, realtime monitoring of patients by therapists from distant places and communication of patients with therapists may be more intuitive and humanfriendly if the patients can operate the rehabilitation system and communicate with the therapists using a handheld interface. Again, the handheld interface may be more intuitive and engaging if the rehabilitation performance can be expressed through some gamelike activities. To do so, a clear understanding of human factors involved in the gaming interface is necessary. However, such knowledge is not available in the literature. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper, the human factors associated with the operation of a handheld gaming interface for robotassisted fullbody smart telerehabilitation of stroke patients are investigated. At first, potential human factors associated with the operation are identified through surveys conducted with healthcare professionals, researchers and patients. The identified human factors are then analyzed and divided into different categories, e.g. physical and cognitive human factors. The role of each human factor in the interface operation is explained. The findings can be utilized to design and develop handheld gaming interfaces for robotassisted telerehabilitation that may be more humanfriendly and intuitive.