Wearable Device for Immersive Virtual Reality Control and Application in Upper Limbs Motor Rehabilitation

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has been used in several areas such as video games, technical training, movies and teaching. VR-based interventions have also been applied for motor rehabilitation, e.g., to help the patient recovery from disabilities provoked by stroke, cognitive deficit or musculoskeletal problem. VR combined with wearable tracking devices creates new possibilities to apply immersive approaches during motor rehabilitation. This can enhance the health care making it more interesting and pleasant for patients as well as more effective for physicians and physiotherapists. However, the costs related to this technology may be impracticable for a wide application by public health system. Therefore, this paper introduces preliminary results for a low-cost wearable device, which is integrated to VR environments aiming to provide a better quality rehabilitation process for most patient with motor disabilities.

Applications of wearable sensors in upper extremity MSK conditions: a scoping review

“…Regarding the software component of studies, the articles have used MATLAB, Python, Microsoft Visual C# software for processing purposes or designing graphical user interfaces. Only one team of researchers has designed a smartphone app to interact with the proposed wearable system [98].…”

“…The number of studies indicating home-based functionality or assessment of comfortability of their proposed designs is significantly lower than the two previous sections. Only one study has claimed that their platform has a home-based functional ability [96], and only one study has focused on assessing their system's comfortability [98]. This can be related to the fact that most of these studies have only considered the general assessment aspect of their platform (n = 16), and these features are of more significant concern in more focused research and areas.…”

“…One of the critical aspects is finding the rate of studies aimed to use wearable sensor platforms for either rehabilitation or treatment applications or increasing the quality of remote treatment sessions. In this regard, 11 studies in the clinical population studies category (35% of studies in the category) [26,27,29,32,33,36,37,40,[42][43][44], three studies in the workers' population studies category (10% of studies in the category) [62,80,85], and two studies in the general wearable studies category (11% of studies in the category) have focused on treatment applications [87,98].…”

Virtual and Augmented Reality for Neurofunctional Recovery and Human Movement Analysis

“…Among the projects aimed at the creation and testing of new technologies for neurorehabilitation, the BRAINN_VR research line is responsible for the areas of development in a) virtual and augmented reality interfaces [1,2,6,8,16,19,20] (immersive and nonimmersive virtual environments) associated with adapted physical activity and context physical and neurofunctional rehabilitation; b) wearable devices for sensing and body recognition associated with the control of virtual environments [3,7,9,12,14,15] (from gestural interaction) and; c) movement analysis solution to quantify the functional evolution and describe the motor behaviour associated with gestural interaction [4,5,17] (KinesiOS software). Figure 2 presents the environment's set-up for carrying out the tests.…”

MIDAS: Multi-sensorial Immersive Dynamic Autonomous System Improves Motivation of Stroke Affected Patients for Hand Rehabilitation

“…It also motivated the subjects to perform rehabilitation exercises. A low-cost wearable device, integrated to VR environments for better rehabilitation process in patients with motor disabilities is presented in [23]. The device translates the movement of the subject's arm into the virtual jigsaw puzzle environment.…”