Exploring the Use of VR for Stroke Therapy

 

 

 

Suffering a stroke often leaves one side of a victim’s body severely impaired in motor function. Our work aims to develop a virtual environment that helps rehabilitate upper body motor skills in stroke patients.

Using a virtual environment holds advantages over traditional therapy, such as complete control over stimuli, immediate performance feedback, and the safe representation of hazardous situations. Consultation with our collaborators in Occupation Therapy suggested we design the virtual environment to simulate daily living activities. For this reason, the environment chosen in this phase of the project was a household kitchen. The task to be performed is reaching out and pushing the buttons on a virtual telephone. Audio feedback of the tone lets the user know when they have “made contact with” the button.

Using the H-Anim standard for virtual humans, a 3D model of the upper body was created and set up to be controlled by input from 8 magnetic position sensors placed on a subject’s upper body. To promote use of the affected limb, only one arm is tracked in the system. Data from the sensors will also be used to measure the user’s performance during the reaching task.