Serious Game Platform with Haptic Feedback and EMG Monitoring for Upper Limb Rehabilitation and Smoothness Quantification on Spinal Cord Injury Patients

Abstract

Cervical Spinal Cord injury (SCI) is a neurological disease that produces, as a consequence, impairments of the upper limb function. This paper illustrates a virtual reality platform based on three serious games for upper limb rehabilitation with electromyography monitoring, providing force feedback to the patient. In the rehabilitation process proposed, haptic feedback was provided to the patients to strength the arm muscles by means of the Novint Falcon device. This end-effector device was used to manipulate the serious games. During the therapy performance, the system recorded electromyography signals from the patient’s arm muscles, which may be used to monitor muscle contraction. The work presented a virtual reality system developed for spinal cord-injured patients. Each virtual reality environment could be modified in strength and duration according to the patients’ needs and was implemented for recording quantitative data about the motor performance. The platform was validated as a proof of concept in cervical spinal cord-injured patients. Results showed that this rehabilitation platform could be used for obtaining objective information in relation to motor control characteristics.

Effectiveness of Virtual Reality on Functional Performance after Spinal Cord Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

“…Although VR-based systems could provide many advantages in neurorehabilitation, such as offering precise measurement, increasing motivation, providing direct feedback and safe environments [ 12 , 40 ], the results obtained in our study revealed that VR interventions might not be more effective than CPT in improving functional performance in patients with SCI. Moreover, the statistical analysis showed favorable results of CPT on the functional independence measured by the FIM scale.…”

“…Due to the rise of this novel technology application in clinical neurorehabilitation in recent years [ 12 ], a large number of studies on the use of VR interventions have been conducted in different neurologic disorders, such as: cerebral palsy [ 13 , 14 ], multiple sclerosis [ 15 , 16 , 17 ], stroke [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ], Parkinson’s disease [ 22 , 23 ]. However, the ratio of functional recovery is different for each disease, so the desired effects provided by VR interventions could be different.…”

A Personalised Emotion-Based Model for Relaxation in Virtual Reality

“…VR has been used in clinical settings to treat a range of cognitive, emotional and motor problems in various psychological and psychiatric disorders [9,[11][12][13][14][15][16]. Many studies have shown that the VR-based therapy is as effective as their in-vivo (traditional) counterpart [13,17,18].…”

“…The arousal is again a max function of the current values of stress, fear and the new candidate values of arousal. The candidate new arousal is based on the preference towards music, the intensity of natural light and the intensity of artificial light as defined in Equation (11). In short, arousal will only increase when fear or stress increases, and it will only decrease when the music is optimal and/or the environment is bright.…”

Up-regulation of MicroRNAs-21 and -223 in a Sprague-Dawley Rat Model of Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury

“…The secondary parenchymal damage is of prolonged nature, based on which candidate treatment modalities have been developed [13][14][15][16]. The severity of the initial TSCI may serve as an indicator of the characteristics and degree of the secondary response; it may also be used to determine optimal treatment modalities [17,18].…”