One game down, two more to go: VRehab’s plan going forward

By: Hadeel Abulenin, Beste Aydin, Abbas Fattah, Tanya Lai, Justin Liu, Anwesha Sarangi, Junwon Shin

The problem revisited

Strokes affect hundreds of thousands of Americans annually, with an overwhelming majority of people experiencing hemiparesis, a weakness/inability to move muscles in one side of the body. One way to help stroke victims regain some of their lost muscle strength is through physical rehabilitation, which typically consists of simple finger and arm movements to help exercise the weakened limbs and joints. The rehabilitation process can last from several weeks to months and the exercises can be tedious and not very engaging. In addition, frequently traveling to rehabilitation facilities can be difficult and inconvenient. With these challenges in mind, VRehab aims to create a collection of fun, interactive VR (virtual reality) games that guide users through various rehabilitation exercises.

Why VR?

In recent years, virtual reality has been used for rehabilitation, but current therapy processes require many equipment and sensors that can be overwhelming or uncomfortable for patients. Our goal with VRehab is to use the inherent technology inside commercial VR headsets to give users a simple plug-and-play experience, all in the comfort of their own homes.

VR is great for implementing two ways of keeping patients engaged: gamification and immersion.

Gaming isn’t just about shooting aliens or upgrading gear; it’s about the desire to do better and improve yourself. That’s why it’s important to give patients an incentive, a tangible goal to work towards. Creating point systems, recording personal bests, and introducing people to engaging scenarios are what will make them want to come back for more.

And if you’ve never used a VR headset before, it is truly a stunning experience. It is as if you have been transported to another reality. You can be put into environments from your wildest dreams and lose yourself in the beautiful scenery. This feeling of wonder, joy, and curiosity will make patients want to come back for more. It’s like stepping into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, a world of pure imagination.

Let’s go to a picnic!

For our second design review, we were able to add to exercises to the picnic scene. In the first exercise, users have to place food objects in different areas of the picnic table. You pick up the food from a basket next to the table, and a zone will appear randomly on the table. Once you put the food inside the zone, the next food object will appear in the basket and the zone will move to another random position. This exercise focuses on the extension, flexion and circumduction of the shoulder as well as the extension of the elbow. In the second exercise, there is another table with a wine glass and a wine bottle. The goal here is to pick up the wine bottle and pour as much wine as possible into the wine glass. This exercise focuses on the lateral and medial rotation of the shoulder. Scoring systems and real-time feedback have not been implemented yet, but they will be by the next design review.

Improvements to picnic and future game ideas

In our picnic scene, we have yet to finish adding all of the potential tasks such as a horseshoe throwing game. Based on our feedback from the design review, our focal points for the upcoming tasks should be customizability, fun factor, and progressive difficulty.

Every stroke patient has different needs, so we want to tune our minigames so that a person who can barely move their arm and a person who is just struggling with finger mobility can get the same experience out of the game. This also ties into progressive difficulty, as we want to make sure that patients won’t plateau; they should be able to use the VR game to their benefit until they’ve completely recovered. One example of our potential changes to allow for these points is to make the landing zone for moving the food on the picnic table larger, or to make the table smaller/bigger to accommodate different ranges of motion. Fun factor is also very important! To encourage patients to stick to their schedules, they have to want to play the game. Some ideas to make the game more addictive (good kind of addiction) are to have a personal best score/time system (to compare with friends or see progress), adding a storyline, or adding levels (old people love their Candy Crush levels).

For future game ideas, we will be putting lots of emphasis on ideas that meet our three aforementioned criteria. Here is a list of potential games:

• Sports collection
• Magic pen
• Cooking game
• Washing/taking care of your car
• Playing instruments