Effects of Gamification and Communication in Virtual Reality Frozen Shoulder Rehabilitation for Enhanced Rehabilitation Continuity
Takashi Ota, Takuto Nakamura, Hideaki Kuzuoka
Abstract
The monotony of movements makes frozen shoulder rehabilitation an boring task for certain patients. This study posits that gamification and the presence of others can effectively address this issue. Accordingly, we developed a virtual reality (VR) application for frozen shoulder rehabilitation exercises and empirically examined the effects of gamification and the presence of others on rehabilitation duration. A user study on 32 subjects revealed that the integration of game elements into a VR rehabilitation program significantly prolonged the rehabilitation duration ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p < 0.001, d = 0.983$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ). Additionally, the rehabilitation duration was considerably longer when participants performed the rehabilitation program with others ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p < 0.05, d = 0.455$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ).