Advancing Stroke Rehabilitation: Designing an Augmented Reality System for Enhanced User Engagement and Recovery

A rising trend of stroke incidence, deaths, prevalence, and Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALYS) creates an ever-growing demand and service of rehabilitation. Bottlenecked by resource constraints, traditional rehabilitation struggles to meet rising demand, necessitating innovative solutions. The purpose of this project is to address the service gap by developing an augmented reality (AR) stroke rehabilitation desktop application to be used by stroke patients at the comfort of their home. This application detects and tracks user body positions as patients are tasked to complete a series of exercises related to stroke rehabilitation. The developed application utilizes Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0 for skeleton and joint tracking, allowing users to interact with augmented virtual objects added to the real-world in real time, coupled with audiovisual feedback. The survey results were collected from the participants of doctors, nurses, medical lab technologist, mild stroke patients, and healthy individuals with family members suffering from stroke. The results supported that this application has successfully provided tele-rehabilitation services of equal efficacy to traditional rehabilitation with improved engagement and flexibility.