Supporting social and adaptive interaction in collaborative rehabilitation training

Abstract

Collaborative training can be considered as a way to support social interaction and enhance training motivation of patients during their rehabilitation. When performing collaborative training exercises as part of the rehabilitation program, a patient collaborates with his/her training partner with the hope that social interaction develops between them. However, different physical abilities which bring a performance gap between a patient and the training partner may impair the course of collaborative rehabilitation training. This issue can be solved by providing adaptivity. The focus of our work is the investigation of social interaction and integration of adaptivity in collaborative rehabilitation training. We have implemented the automatic adaptation of interaction difficulty in a collaborative training exercise developed to support upper arm rehabilitation for Multiple Sclerosis patients. A user study was carried out to investigate the social interaction and the adaptation outcome. With adaptation, we found that a better progress of performance was shown, a better quality of interaction was perceived and the training sessions were more enjoyable. The development of social interaction was also observed during the collaborative rehabilitation training.