Utilization of Affective Computing for Cognitive and Physical Rehabilitation of Victims of Traumatic Brain Injury

Rehabilitation of Traumatic Brain Injury is difficult for many reasons. The symptoms are pervasive, the brain is a complex organ to rehabilitate, the manifestations of symptoms are hard for the unaffected to understand and exceedingly frustrating to the patient. The increasing numbers of military personnel suffering from TBI make it problematical to treat due to the range of locations that soldiers are in such as deployed, in a field hospital, in an overseas treatment hospital, in a stateside treatment hospital, in a rehabilitation setting or at home. Our objective is to create a highly interactive suite of console-based game applications which include affective data to accelerate or decelerate game level (i.e. cognitive/behavioral, sensory and motor skill challenge) according to emotional state as communicated by affective state. The game suite would include three different games for three levels of Traumatic Brain Injury: Mild, Moderate, Severe. The concept idea described in this proposal is a game intended for use with patients with Mild Traumatic Brain injury on the Nintendo Wii system. We are however, willing to work with any system that is most appropriate as determined by the TPOC. We have chosen the Wii system for our proposal concept for two reasons. 1. It enables the inclusion of a level of physical movement and interaction not currently available on any other system. We have been advised by our brain injury subject matter experts that this system is ideal based on the needs of this specific rehabilitation population; a combination of cognitive/behavioral, sensory and motor skill challenges. 2. It is low cost and/or already in existence in rehabilitation facilities as well as in soldiers homes.