VR based Interactive and Exhaustive Application for Hand Rehabilitation
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Physiotherapy has consistently been monotonous all these years, leading to non-compliance of patients to exercise courses. There are several other reasons for this non-compliance—substantial costs in travelling to a rehab centre, time spent in rehab centre, discouragement and the doctor’s personality. Therefore, an application with all/most of the factors for non-compliance eradicated is necessary. Such an application must be portable, independent of doctor’s supervision and must be in the form of games. Many physiotherapy doctors reveal a fact that the patients have a lot of resistance to admit that they must undergo rehabilitation and to come to rehab centre. We have attempted to totally eradicate this problem. Our research focuses on developing a prototype of the efficient application as described above. It is a gamification of hand rehabilitation exercises, which is portable. All that a patient would need is Leap Motion Sensor for recognizing the exercises (as gestures) and checking for correctness of the exercises. This application eliminates the need for a patient to visit the rehab centre every day for treatment. In this application, patients exercises repeatedly by playing the game for every exercise. Also, scores obtained in each game, display of accomplishment messages on successful completion makes it more interesting and motivates them. By using this application, monotony in physiotherapy becomes insignificant for the patient and he/she is encouraged to try more. Application ensures correctness of patients’ exercises by pausing the timer which runs in every game and by counting only valid gestures. Name of the exercise completed, date and time of completion, scores and duration are consolidated into a report every session and saved by the application to the report file, based on which the treatment advances. ...learn more
Project status: Published/In Market
Overview / Usage
Physiotherapy has been very monotonous for patients and they tend to lose interest and motivation in exercising. Introducing games with short term goals in the field of rehabilitation is the best alternative, to maintain patients’ motivation. Our research focuses on gamification of Hand Rehabilitation exercises to engage patient’s wholly in rehab and to maintain their compliance to repeated exercising, for speedy recovery from hand injuries (wrist, fingers). This is achieved by integrating Leap Motion Sensor with Unity game development engine. Exercises (as gestures) are recognised and validated by Leap Motion Sensor. Game application for exercises is developed using Unity. This system tracks the gestures of the patient’s hands and records the performance and correctness of the exercises. Gamification alternative has been implemented by very few in the globe and it has been taken as a challenge in our research. We could successfully design and build and engine which would be interactive and real-time, providing platform for rehabilitation. We have enabled users to know the score through graphical user interface.
Methodology / Approach
An interactive application that not only provides the output based on the user input that uses gesture tracking system to communicate but also superimposes the virtual elements. Using Leap Motion sensor we are developing a virtual rehabilitation tool through gestures for a speedy recovery from hand (wrist, fingers) injuries through interesting games.
Technologies Used
Unity, Leap Motion Sensor.