Background:
Psychotic symptoms affect patients with the schizophrenia spectrum in life’s major areas, such as work, interpersonal relationships, or self-care, and the usual treatment is performed with the help of antipsychotic medication, which targets primarily the hallucinations, delirium, etc. Other symptoms, such as personal and social functioning (PSF) in activities of daily living, require a multidisciplinary approach, including rehabilitation therapy. The present project addresses the use of digital technologies to design and develop an innovative rehabilitation technique, particularly focusing on PSF.

Objectives:
To develop a psychoeducational rehabilitation program which include at least 2 digital rehabilitation tools (i.e., serious games) which allow for creation of immersive environments that contribute to a more effective and lasting recovery of psychiatric inpatients.

Method:
Serious games will be developed to provide to inpatients scenario-based conversational skills training to complement standard psychoeducational skills training for emotional recognition, emotional expression, use of effective communication skills and use of structured problem solving offered to inpatients admitted to the acute inpatient Unit of Clinical Psychiatry, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy. The inpatients (with the support of the ward’s staff) will have access to the serious games using a regular computer, with keyboard, mouse, and monitor. To start the games, the inpatients will access the website in which reside the games and register with a username and password. The games will include short stories, with interactive animated scenes in which the actors experience situations that may cause various emotions and mental conditions or problems to resolve in daily activities. As the story unfolds, and after each scene, the user will be queried about what happened, and which strategies he would use in the place of actors. The games will provide user feedback and, in the event of errors, they will be able to display a hyperlink with information and strategies, whose objective will be to help users understand the scene that they just watched and apply effective coping strategies. Supervision will be conducted by the ward’s staff as a routine activity.

Conclusion:
In the conference the design and development of the above mentioned digital psychoeducational rehabilitation program, contributing to the promotion of well-being and health in a holistic perspective, focusing mainly on personal and social functioning rehabilitation in people diagnosed with schizophrenia, will be presented.

Keywords: Mental health, digital interventions, serious game, psychoeducational strategies.