Blogs / Discoblog

Wii rehab might sound like radical intervention for video game addicts, but it’s actually effective physical therapy for patients recovering from strokes, injuries, or surgeries. Otherwise tedious strength and coordination exercises go by a little easier if they involve waving a wireless controller to play virtual bowling, tennis, and golf. But it doesn’t stop there. The next step in video game rehab is “Air Guitar Hero,” which would allow amputees to rock out with the immensely popular Guitar Hero game using a mechanical arm wired to their chest muscles.

As part of a DARPA initiative for prosthetics research, scientists are now able to reroute the nerves that once controlled an amputee’s arm to the chest muscles, where electrodes can then pick up the electromyographic signals to control a mechanical arm. But the process of learning how to accurately control a prosthetic arm, not to mention individual fingers, using only twitches of the chest, can be a slow and discouraging one. So researchers at Johns Hopkins University hacked a Guitar Hero controller so that its color-coded frets could be controlled with signals from the electrodes.

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Games aren’t for the computer geek anymore — as many as 65 percent of American households admit to playing video and computer games , according to the Entertainment Software Association. Recently, serious money has been pumped into scientific studies to see if these games offer any therapeutic benefits (besides entertainment).

The Health Games Research program studies games to see how they can influence players’ health and fitness choices. In one study, college freshman compete Survivor-style in an “interactive fictional story — a mystery that takes eight weeks to solve” to reiterate the importance of getting enough exercise and teach them how to make healthy lifestyle choices. Another study involves feeding virtual characters to teach people how to eat healthy and how to avoid “mindless eating.”

In addition, the game company PopCap Games found in a recent customer survey that one in five of their customers has a physical or mental disability, and that these users play the games for “relief or distraction” from their ailment.

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