Virtual reality for post-stroke shoulder-arm motor rehabilitation: Training system & assessment method

Stroke is one of the major diseases around the world. The brain injury caused by stroke will derive sustaining neurological disorder of different forms, which in turn will lead to all kinds of limb and body exercise hindrance and will cause significant challenge to the life of the patient, that is, the quality of life of the patient is going to be strictly affected. Along with the development and popularity of technology, scholars in the medical care and rehabilitation fields are trying to integrate all kinds of new technologies to perform the development of new rehabilitation training system. This research aims at rehabilitation items of upper limbs, which include the reciprocating stretching of upper limb, reaching of the upper arm, bi-lateral coordination and balance of the body. In association with interactive technology, game technology, sensor technology and stereo image technology, virtual reality physical-based training task is developed, and initial pilot test is done on patient with stroke, meanwhile, multi-dimensional experimental results are acquired, which include clinical test assessment, task performance, historical data of exercise track and psychological emotional data. The research objectives are to verify the functionality of the system, to verify the effectiveness of the system on rehabilitation, to develop new assessment method and to investigate topics related to human machine interaction. The experimental results have verified the functionality of this rehabilitation training task in all aspects. Through the exercise analysis of the historical data of exercise track and the statistical analysis of task performance of the past therapy sessions, this system can acquire successfully reliable and valuable information to be used for future verification of medical therapeutic effectiveness and the development of new type of clinical assessment method. In the mean time, according to the measured psychological emotional data as perceived subjectively, this system indeed can urge the patient to engage continuously rehabilitation therapeutic session that is based on this training system and enjoy it, besides, the authors are very confident on the possibly generated rehabilitation effect of these two training tasks.