A broken arm as a boy led Cosmin Mihaiu and some inventive colleagues to turn tedious physical rehabilitation exercises into a game that they hope can make it easier for people to recover from injuries.
The Romania-born software engineer demonstrated the game Thursday at the prestigious TED Conference in Vancouver, showing how it can be played on the motion-sensing video game platform Kinect for Micosoft's Xbox.
"We need to come up with solutions to get patients motivated to get better," Mihaiu told AFP.
Mihaiu and colleagues devised the software application to work with physical therapists to customize motion-control games to reward patients for doing prescribed movements.
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"We don't want to replace the physical therapists," Mihaiu said.
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Mira is being tried in clinics in Britain and Romania, with an annual subscription price of several thousand dollars, Mihaiu said.
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Other game makers have caught on.
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The France-based video game titan created "Dig Rush" in collaboration with US health technology startup Amblyotech, using treatment technology from innovators at McGill University in Canada.
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The game is like a "syringe of the future; where you use a visual display to administer a drug to a patient," Amblyotech chief executive Joseph Koziak said at a game developers conference in San Francisco.
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