HEROES, Design of an Exergame for Balance Recovery of Stroke Patients for a Home Environment

Stroke survivors suffer from balance impairment, causing an increased risk of falling. To recover balance, adequate stepping responses are key and these are practised by perturbing the patients during rehabilitation. Serious videogames, such as exergames, that train voluntary stepping can be found, but they don’t allow to practice fast recovery steps in people with stroke. In this paper, we propose the design of a serious exergame (HEROES) to train stepping responses of stroke patients in a home environment. For this, we employed recent findings of action observation and motor imagery. We followed an iterative user-centred methodology to design the HEROES exergame. Stroke patients, physiotherapists and game designers were involved in every stage. The design of the HEROES exergame complies with the stroke accessibility guidelines, providing clear instructions and feedback. Therapeutic goals are defined by the progression of the level, ensuring to train paretic and non-paretic legs in a safe but challenging set-up.