Background: Healthcare environments are continuously improving their conditions, especially regarding the use of current technology. Considering the field of rehabilitation, the use of videogames and related technology has helped to develop new rehabilitations procedures. Patients are able to work on their disabilities through new processes which are more motivating and entertaining. However, these patients have a duty to leave their home environment in order to complete their rehabilitation program.

Objective: The authors have focused their research interests on finding a solution for patients to eliminate the need to leave their routines in order to attend rehabilitation therapy. In this way, a novel system has been developed which allows patients with a balance disorder to perform a specific rehabilitation exercise at home. Additionally, the system features an assistant tool to complement the work of physiotherapists. The medical staff is provided with a system which avoids the need for them to be present during the exercise in specific cases under adequate supervision.

Methods: Regarding videogames techniques, an essential element of the system we have developed is the interaction based on movement offered by Kinect. The system includes a framework that analyzes the patient’s movements to create indications and corrections during the rehabilitation exercise.

Results: Two professional therapists, who are specialists in balance disorder rehabilitation, have evaluated the system. They used the system freely during a period of time and provided interesting and optimistic opinions. They found the system to be an interesting and useful tool to be applied in rehabilitation therapies. In addition, they gave essential feedback based on their experience to improve the features of the system.

Conclusions: The system developed improves rehabilitation conditions of people with balance disorder. The main contribution comes from the fact that it allows patients to perform the rehabilitation process at home under the supervision of physiotherapists. As a result, patients avoid having to attend medical centers. Additionally, medical staff obtains an assistant that means their presence is not required in many cases where there is a need for constant repetition of the exercise.

Trial Registration: The research presented in this paper has not needed patient enrollment.

Every day the number of diseases related to brain problems increases dramatically. Medical facilities are full of people who need complex rehabilitation processes as a result of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, brain stroke, or multiple sclerosis, as well as other conditions. Patients often spend a long time travelling every day to get to the corresponding rehabilitation clinics. Physiotherapists carefully attend patients over a period of time, and the exercises are often extremely repetitive. The type of patient suffering from these type of illnesses is unable to perform many common every day actions such as getting-up from a chair, walking in a straight line, picking up objects, etc. The system we propose in this paper provides a way for patients to perform the common rehabilitation process of getting- up from a chair. It monitors and guides the patient when the specialist considers they are prepared to do so. The specialists can focus on the results and the way to improve each rehabilitation process and not just on iterations.

This work shows the evolution of teaching HCI in the university studies of computer engineering at the University of Lleida. The progress is described in terms of the content and the teaching methodologies based on the experience acquired during the last 25 years. The article details the changes made in the different degrees, from the methodology to the content perspective. The intent is to provide a reference document that can be useful for the teaching community interested in the Human-Computer Interaction discipline.

Movement-based interaction has brought about new possibilities in healthcare environments. Concretely, rehabilitation therapies represent an adequate domain in which this kind of systems can produce significant benefits. In this sense, the authors have developed SIVIRE, a movement-based interaction system whose main contributions are a virtual online editor of exercises with the capacity to adapt the rehabilitation to the patients’ conditions and evolution. During the development process, we have considered some aspects regarding the monitoring process to improve the quality and accuracy of the system, such as monitoring the patient’s postures, which is a critical procedure to properly correct and guide them. Specifically, this paper presents the different monitoring techniques the authors have analysed. We have analysed three mechanisms that address the monitoring process in a different way: the first one using joint coordinates, the second one based on bones coordinates and the last one using the angles generated by the bones. After the analysis of these three different mechanisms, the authors discuss the reason to identify the use of joint coordinates as the best technique to monitor patients in this kind of movement-based interaction systems. Finally, we present the results of the evaluation of the system implemented with this monitoring mechanism.