The Effects of Breath Training on Users' Experience in a Virtual Reality Stroke Rehabilitation Game

Abstract

Stroke patients can regain their motor and cognitive functions through rehabilitation based on neuroregeneration. Following the development of technology, Virtual Reality serious games have brought stroke rehabilitation to a new level due to the lower cost, higher levels of interaction, and more real-life-related tasks. During the rehabilitation, the user's internal status, such as emotion, fatigue and stress level, can affect their learning and training experience. However, many rehabilitation games did not consider these factors, and the effect remains poorly understood. The purpose of this thesis is to study how to improve users' training experience by manipulating the user's internal status positively. As an effective method to reduce anxiety and increase parasympathetic activity, breath training is applied in the rehabilitation relaxation section. A controlled experiment is conducted to test the effects of the breath training relaxation section: the control group was guided to sit still between different training sections, while the experiment group had deep breath guidance during their relaxation time. Results indicate that the users' internal status did not significantly differ during the training. However, the experiment group showed a lower level of stress

and a higher level of satisfaction after the rehabilitation training. In conclusion, short- term breath training relaxation can improve user satisfaction by reducing user pressure.

However, it does not influence users' internal status during the training and does not affect users' emotions and performance.