Towards An Awareness Interpretation For Physical And Cognitive Rehabilitation Systems

When collaborating remotely, being aware of other participants (their actions, locations, status, etc.) is paramount to achieve a proper collaboration. This issue is magnified when talking about rehabilitation systems, whose users may require additional specific awareness information, due to their cognitive or physical disabilities. Moreover, because of these disabilities, this awareness may be provided by using specific feedback stimuli. This constituted the main motivation of this work: the development of an awareness interpretation for collaborative cognitive and physical therapies. With this aim, an awareness interpretation already applied to the collaborative games field has been modified and extended to make it suitable for these systems. Furthermore, in order to put this interpretation into practice, a case study based on an association image-writing rehabilitation pattern is presented illustrating how this cognitive rehabilitation task has been extended with collaborative features and enriched with awareness information.