Video games in therapy: a therapist's perspective

This paper describes a user and task analysis, complemented with participatory design sessions, conducted to examine the role of therapists in the use of video games in therapy. The results show that video games were used often, but improvements could be made to make them more effective for the therapist. From these results, design recommendations for video games were derived. Recommendations include that a therapeutic video game should be easy to start–up and configure, yet support calibration and adaptation for a wide variety of impairments, should allow the therapist to support a patient during play and should support the therapist in tracking a patient's performance and reporting on his performance.