Designing for Interactive Rehabilitation in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) offers excellent prospects for rehabilitation. The central concept of VR rehabilitation systems is to provide immersion and motivation to patients in the VR environment while they perform rehabilitation exercises in the physical world. However, existing VR-based rehabilitation solutions rely on conventional interaction devices, such as VR controllers. Specifically, they do not provide custom hardware or tailor the interactions in the physical world to the patients’ physical therapy requirements. This study focuses on designing an interactive VR device to help rehabilitate musculoskeletal elbow injuries or similar conditions. In such cases, the treatment involves exercises for the wrist and hand. The developed custom controller is implemented in a physical object with sensors to track rehabilitation performance. The object used for rehabilitation is represented and interacted with in a dedicated game-like VR environment. This environment targets user engagement, experience, and motivation. In this way, we realize rehabilitation-customized physical and virtual object interactions instead of the interactions that employ existing VR controllers. In the experiment, participants were asked to perform two rehabilitation exercises that involved interacting with the designed VR rehabilitation system. A series of questions were asked as part of the user experience evaluation. The results showed a positive participant experience. Based on the data from the sensors in the rehabilitation object, we can quantify the rehabilitation performance. In this way, the rehabilitation outcomes can be judged by the patient or the therapist. The approach described in this study allows for designing custom interactions tailored to specific rehabilitation cases.