Nowadays, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability. Consequently, post-stroke hand rehabilitation is essential for patients to recover their hand functions. However, traditional approaches to hand rehabilitation usually involve repetitive hand exercises, which can be tedious and not engaging, leading to poor adherence of patients to the treatment plan. Recently, game-based approaches have been widely adopted to make hand rehabilitation more interactive and enjoyable. Game-based systems create an interactive environment where patients can enjoy the games while still participating in the recovery process, thus enhancing the interest and engagement of patients. Moreover, the significant growth of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision has led to the development of advanced hand gesture recognition techniques that could be applied in game-based systems and achieve high accuracy. This work proposes a real-time hand gesture recognition system and a gaming application for hand rehabilitation. The purpose of this work is to support and encourage patients to practice hand therapy exercises by means of interesting video games. The proposed system can recognize predefined hand gestures using the skeletal data captured by a Leap Motion Controller and then use the gestures to interact with the game environment. All the hand gestures were selected from common hand and wrist therapy exercises that are often practiced by post-stroke patients. We also conducted a user study involving 10 participants from different demographic backgrounds to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The results showed that the proposed system is engaging and can be a potential solution to hand rehabilitation.

Polymeric Membranes are a technological innovation for separation and filtration. They are composed of advanced materials, such as Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), which imparts mechanical stability to the membrane and helps to prevent biofouling, along with a hydrophobic character that facilitates the coagulation phase, and the polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) provides a hydrophilic nature, enhancing its affinity for the reaction medium and assisting in the filtration process. This structure allows the passage of substances through it while retaining larger particles and external contaminants, making selective filtration a differentiating factor in wastewater treatment. One strategy to further enhance the properties of these membranes is the incorporation of activated carbon during manufacturing. Activated carbon has a high surface area and adsorption capacity, making it effective in adsorbing different substances. This study aims to produce mixed polymeric membranes incorporating activated carbon, using PVDF and PVP as polymers and N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) as the solvent. These membranes will be employed for the filtration of phenolic compounds, such as phenol. In a membrane with the formulation of 1.3g of PVP, 1.15g of PVDF, 8.8 ml of NMP, and 2.5g of activated carbon, with different thicknesses of 150 µm and 300 µm, approximately 56.77% and 90.35% of 50mg/l of phenol in a model wastewater were removed in 5 minutes, respectively, with breakthrough occurring in 15 minutes. Thus, it is possible to demonstrate the viability of using these membranes in the treatment of model wastewater containing phenolic compounds, where the 300 µm membrane showed better results, only requiring scaling up for practical application.