Serious Gaming and Artificial Intelligence in Rehabilitation of Rheumatoid Arthritis Gabriela VARGA a,1 , Lăcrămioara STOICU-TIVADAR a and Stelian NICOLA a a Politehnica University Timișoara, Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, 2, Vasile Pârvan Blvd., 300223, Timișoara, România Abstract. This paper presents a current situation of studies and applications which are using serious games and artificial intelligence (AI) in rehabilitation of rheumatoid arthritis, and possible future directions. The objectives of this paper are: to highlight the technologies used for recovery of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), to summarize the state of the art of existing applications and to present the authors work, a software application that aims contributing to the recovery of the specific patients. At this stage the application was tested by a group of 10 patients from Medical Centre Sf. Mary of Timisoara. Most of the patients reported that the physical and psychical effort were between easy-very easy. The patients confirmed that they would use the application in their rehabilitation process and are very excited about this type of rehabilitation that stimulates curiosity and a state of wellbeing. The application works based on the leap motion device that proved to be the most suitable device in terms of precision and the manner of interaction in virtual reality games. Keywords. rheumatoid arthritis, serious games, multimodal interaction, artificial intelligence 1. Introduction Rheumatic disease is the most common disease met in the aging society [1]. The rehabilitation of these patients’ trough physical exercises and physiotherapy has been shown that can significantly improve the joints functions of these patients [1]. Currently the patients complained about the issues raised in these pandemic times with the access to the physiotherapy clinics. As nowadays the technology is continuously improving in a lot of fields, it can play a vital role in medicine. There are mobile applications which help the patients with rheumatoid arthritis to track their medication plan, pain, symptoms, mood, and sleep such as: MyrRA, My Pain Diary, RheumaHelper, DAS28, PainScale. In terms of rehabilitation using virtual reality, serious games, and artificial intelligence there are fewer applications. This paper presents a summary of the current literature in terms of using serious gaming and artificial intelligence in recovery of rheumatoid. arthritis (RA) and we purpose an application which can be considered suitable for rehabilitation of these patients. Physical exercises and physiotherapy are very important to maintain the joint function for the patients with rheumatoid arthritis. ‘International guidelines for long-term treatment of RA recommend non-pharmacological interventions as adjunctive therapy to pharmacologic treatment’[1]. Therefore, it is 1 Corresponding Author: Gabriela Varga, University Politehnica Timisoara, P-ta Victoriei no. 2, Timisoara, Romania; E-mail: gabriela.varga@student.upt.ro. Advances in Informatics, Management and Technology in Healthcare J. Mantas et al. (Eds.) © 2022 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI220790 562