A View on VR-Enhanced Rehabilitation Robotics

Robot-assisted gait training can increase the duration and number of training sessions, whilst reducing the number of therapists required per patient. However, training can often be boring for the patient so that the training intensity is low. Furthermore, training is usually limited to a single modality, providing only force feedback to guide the movement. Virtual reality (VR) with multimodal displays has the chance to feedback performance information to the patient, augment the training with additional audiovisual features, thus, making the therapy more exciting and increasing patient motivation. In this paper we present results from the literature and preliminary results from our research about novel VR strategies applied to gait and arm therapy. Broad clinical testing is still required to determine its efficacy or effectiveness on patient motivation