A Systematic Review of the Use of Virtual Reality Games in Post-stroke Rehabilitation

Video games are known for being great at captivating the attention of the user, and by applying Virtual Reality they create vivid, realistic, and exciting experiences. Strokes affect a large portion of the world's population, causing innumerable deaths, and leaving a great number of its survivors with disabilities in their upper limbs. With this paper we intend to review the role of virtual reality games on the post-stroke recovery of the upper limbs. A systematic search was conducted in March 2021 using IEEE, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and ACM Digital Library databases. According to the 9 articles selected from the 153 surveyed, Virtual Reality has proven to be particularly useful in both keeping patients focused and entertained during their training, which would otherwise be viewed as a repetitive and uninteresting task. Based on the analysis of the reviewed papers, we identify and present in this study several useful techniques for developing an engaging, motivating, and effective Virtual Reality serious game for poststroke rehabilitation.