The Pursuit of Flow in the Design of Rehabilitation Systems for Ambient Assisted Living: A Review of Current Knowledge

This review paper gathers together the key sources on the science of engagement and immersion, in particular the concept of flow. Flow is a psychological description for full immersion in an activity. It provides a useful framework within which to understand the coupling between pervasive computing and end users. The article discusses the concept of flow in a general psychological sense and extracts those features relevant to gaming, and in particular the human-computer interaction (HCI) aspect of such systems. The requirements for achieving flow such as reward, situational control, feedback and clarity of purpose as applicable to a pervasive computing environment are discussed in detail. The primary application focus of flow in this paper lies in the area of ambient-assisted living solutions for rehabilitation purposes. In the context of using virtual environments to aid in skill training or medical rehabilitation, dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) and enjoyment are two key elements used to create a fully immersive experience. This paper both reviews the techniques for creating these elements and describes possibilities for harnessing related methods as evaluation techniques for immersion in HCI-based rehabilitation environments, which may offer an alternative to current survey-based mechanisms.