[WEB SITE] Virtual Reality and Rehabilitation — A Perfect Match?

9.2.2016 Ville Lahtinen

This is a story about VR Rehab. The story started last September in Demola, when a team of six students from different fields came together to work on a project called “Rehabilitation Using Virtual Reality”. During the course of the next four months this team explored the possibilities that VR brings to the world of rehabilitation.

Our team consisted of two coders, one business specialist, two health professionals, and me, the UX design / branding guy. The device Vincit gave us, Samsung Gear VR, proved to be a really nice headset with one small drawback: it doesn’t offer any hand tracking possibilities. And as hand movements play a pretty big role in many rehabilitation exercises, this was a challenge. But we of course like challenges.

The first target group we started designing for were hemispatial neglect patients. Neglect is a complex neurophysiological condition in which patients fail to be aware of items to one side of space. The majority of neglect patients are old people with brain injuries, and this target group quickly turned out to be a bit too challenging for us, as virtual reality is so immersive and therefore maybe a bit frightening for many older people.

After some more research we came up with the idea of a balance training game. Balance problems are common and their rehabilitation doesn’t necessarily require awareness of hand positions. The basic idea of the game was quickly formed: the patients’ objective is to focus their gaze on moving objects and keep looking at them for a certain time period. In the first version of the game these objects are fish and the background is an underwater view.

Everything in the game is meant to be fully customizable for each patient separately, though because of time-related constraints our team didn’t have the resources to fully implement everything we planned. Also with the help of a 360 degree camera the background could in theory be changed to a view that is meaningful for the patient. So if the patient for example has to spend large amounts of time indoors, this way they could visit familiar places virtually.

We did some user testing with our game at Pirkanmaan Erikoiskuntoutus, and the feedback we got was really positive. With some more work the game will certainly be of use for many patients. For example added levels and awards would probably make the game even more interesting and motivating.

In the coming months the first “real” VR headsets, like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, will be released to the consumer market. The possibilities they offer for rehabilitation purposes are much bigger, not just because of hand tracking, but also because of the added computational power. Therefore we put our thoughts in the future and also made a prototype for a platform, which would function as a collection of different games and experiences designed for rehabilitation use. This platform would store patient data so that all the progress could easily be tracked and monitored, and naturally it would work with every headset.

All in all we are pretty satisfied with the end result. Of course lots of things could have been made differently and more efficiently, but the goal was to explore the possibilities of VR, and that is what we did. Probably every team member also got new valuable experiences while working on this project. The victory of the Demola season we aimed for was frustratingly close, as we came second, but at least there were 25 teams behind us.

I’m convinced that virtual reality has lots of potential in making rehabilitation more fun and motivating. If you want to read more about the journey, please visit our blog.

Ville Lahtinen

Virtual Reality and Rehabilitation — A Perfect Match? – Ohjelmistotalo Vincit Oy

[WEB SITE] Gamified VR Physical Rehabilitation with VRecover

Michael Aratow is a clinician and health care executive who founded VRecover, which is health care startup making physical rehabilitation exercises more engaging with VR. He says that rehab is like homework, but that sometimes up to 90% of people don’t actually do the exercises. VRecover is betting that gamifying rehab exercises within immersive VR environments will help accelerate the healing process while making it more fun to do.

Michael says that governments are looking for ways to cut costs and save money, and he sees that improving the rehab process is a simple and easy way to do that. Not only can surgery be avoided all together in some cases, but it can help accelerate the healing process with both rehabilitation and prehabilitation exercises.

VRecover is planning on developing a number of different VR experiences targeting the most popular rehab exercises starting with issues with the back, arms, and legs. For example, in order to increase the range of motion on the arms, they created a VR experiences where you close blast doors on a space ship. There’s an endless number of possibilities for creating experiences that encourage physical motion and have a therapeutic benefit, and they’ll be using a data-driven approach in deciding which rehab exercises that they’ll be initially targeting.

Michael has been involved with medicine in VR for the past 15 years, and he says that there’s over a decade’s worth of research showing how effect VR treatments are. There’s one study in particular that provided bogus range of motion feedback, and was able to show that people were able to have a wider range of motion that went beyond what they were able to do without VR.

VR rehab has the potential to start to gather more specific data on motion than was possible before. Not only could more accurate range of motion measurements be made over time, but it also could open up new metrics that weren’t possible to measure before such as velocity of movement. This could represent a trend towards personalizing rehab exercises beyond the standardized regiment that has been traditionally been given.

Recover is also going to target physical therapy offices directly rather than the general consumer market. The idea would be that the people would have to come into the office to do rehab exercises within a room-scale VR environment. Their initial prototype was using a Kinect to measure the range of motion, but they haven’t settled on a specific technology stack just yet. Perhaps they’ll eventually sell directly to the consumer market once the adoption of consumer VR grows past the point of existing game consoles, but they’re keeping their customer service demand lower by taking a B2B approach.

Finally, Michael sees that VR provides a new gateway into the mind, and that presence from immersive technologies enable a lot of new healing capabilities through enhancing cognition, controlling pain, and being able to manipulate perception for good.

Source: Gamified VR Physical Rehabilitation with VRecover – Road to VR