Rewiring the Brain: VR Games for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation

Stroke is the sudden blockage of blood in the brain cells that leads to lack of supply of oxygen to various parts of body causing paresis. Due to this, an individual will experience various problems affecting day-to-day activities like gait, balance, speech, memory disorders and loss in neuromuscular functional. To regain those lost functionalities, one should undergo physiotherapy that includes activities mirroring the real-life scenarios. Since the physiotherapy involves continuous monitoring, high man-power and heavy-loaded tasks, the rise of Virtual Reality into the field of healthcare has emerged. The preliminary study aimed to develop a multi-level Virtual Reality (VR) exergames for Upper Limb affected Stroke Survivors that replicates the conventional physiotherapeutic exercises. The customized VR exercises were developed according to the motor functioning ability and cognitive abilities of an individual. Categorization of stroke survivors into two groups as conventional and VR therapy group where the conventional group will be trained with only physiotherapy techniques and VR therapy group will trained with both physiotherapy ad VR-based therapy simultaneously. The VR therapy should be carried out with an intervention period of about 20 minutes/day and conventional therapy will exceed up to 45miunutes/day. Several outcome measurement techniques and questionnaires need to conducted before the training period to identify the level of severity of stroke affected to an individual for allocating training sessions accordingly with patient-centric games and after to analyze the motor and cognitive functionality of an individual. The repetitive training of combined conventional physiotherapy and VR-based task-oriented exercises will quantitatively improvise the musculoskeletal and cognitive ability of an individual is the primary outcome. Neurologically affected body parts get innervated this qualitative combined VR and conventional therapy is the secondary outcome of this preliminary study. Follow-up sessions needs to conduct as a future work. Further research aspects of this study includes, analyze and classification of features of neuromuscular databases collected from an individual by feeding those datasets into Machine Learning techniques.