Abstract: Stroke is a leading cause of life-lasting motor impairments, undermining the quality of life of stroke survivors and their families, and representing a major challenge for a world population that is ageing at a dramatic rate. Important technological developments and neuroscientific discoveries have contributed to a better understanding of stroke recovery.
Virtual Reality (VR) arises as a powerful tool because it allows merging contributions from engineering, human computer interaction, rehabilitation medicine and neuroscience to propose novel and more effective paradigms for motor rehabilitation. However, despite evidence of the benefits of these novel training paradigms, most of them still rely on the choice of particular technological solutions tailored to specific subsets of patients.
Here we present an integrative framework that utilizes concepts of human computer confluence to
- enable VR neurorehabilitation through interface technologies, making VR rehabilitation paradigms accessible to wide populations of patients, and
- create VR training environments that allow the personalization of training to address the individual needs of stroke patients.
The use of these features is demonstrated in pilot studies using VR training environments in different configurations: as an online low-cost version, with a myoelectric robotic orthosis, and in a neurofeedback paradigm.
Finally, we argue about the need of coupling VR approaches and neurocomputational modelling to further study stroke and its recovery process, aiding on the design of optimal rehabilitation programs tailored to the requirements of each user.
TBI Rehabilitation 