Serious Games for Home Based Rehabilitation: Inertial Sensor Energy Consumption
Abstract Background Serious games have recently immerged as a good tool for physical rehabilitation. This new technology can be used at home, to complement a traditional, clinic based, rehabilitation program. To implement a serious game at home, we need to use multiple sensors to record patients' data. Many serious games use visual motion capture techniques, like the Kinect camera, due to their low price and high portability. On the other hand, some other systems use inertial sensors to collect data at a higher degree of accuracy. In previous works, we showed that a serious gaming system could benefit from combining data from different sensors. However, the use of inertial sensors, in a home based setting, remains a challenge since they need to be supplied by an independent battery source, which could influence the acceptability of such systems. Methods In this paper, we present an energy consumption study, performed on the inertial sensors used in our serious game system. Results The results show that the sensors are rarely affected by environmental factors. They also show that the sensors can function continuously for about 14 hours without battery recharge. Conclusion Finally, these results allowed us to establish an optimal set up configuration for home based rehabilitation using serious games.