Influence awareness: considering motivation in computer-assisted rehabilitation

Abstract

The use of computers in the e-Health domain is becoming increasingly common, since technology is present in most aspects of our lives. In the rehabilitation field in particular, some additional issues requiring the use of computer-assisted therapies arise. On the one hand, there is a scarce availability of rehabilitation specialists and centers to satisfy the growing demand of their services. This problem gets even magnified because of the ageing population. On the other hand, the huge opportunities that the new interaction devices can bring to rehabilitation smooth the path towards novel therapies. Nevertheless, even if a proper rehabilitation therapy is prescribed, it can fail because of the patient´s lack of motivation There are assorted motivation theories available in the literature to address this demotivation of patients. Unfortunately, there is no model or guide to put those theories into practice in computer-assisted rehabilitation. This paper is aimed at filling this gap by providing a model, namely Influence Awareness, to support the specification of motivation aspects in those applications used in computer-assisted rehabilitation. Furthermore, some guidelines are also provided, so that the designer can get some extra guidance on some heuristics about how to design motivation. The integration of motivation design into a model-based development process is presented by showing how this motivation model is integrated into a task model. Finally, to better illustrate our approach a case study based on a collaborative e-Health system is also included.