ProCibo : A Virtual Reality Environment for Functional Reach Training

Samenvatting

From the moment we set our first steps we practise walking until it eventually becomes second nature. However, due to injury, illness, or disease, someone might lose control over this automated task. In these cases, physical therapy is often used to help restore a patient’s use of muscles and train a new automatic walking pattern. An important element in physiotherapy is to reduce postural sway and increase functional reach which can include using a body weight support system to let patients experience walking at an early stage of their rehabilitation. However, this also restricts them to a predefined area, away from everyday situations. As continuing their rehabilitation throughout everyday life can be challenging, being able to bring these everyday situations into the rehabilitation therapy might therefore aid their transition. In our project ‘Virtual Reality for Rehabilitation’ we try to achieve this by transferring everyday situation into a virtual reality environment. In addition, this also allows for usage data to be collected, analyzed, and presented to provide meaningful insights. For this we are developing a system that supports patients as well as therapists.