Development of a potential system for upper limb rehabilitation training based on virtual reality

Abstract

This paper proposed a novel rehabilitation system for rehabilitation training of the upper limbs for patients whose brain injured such as stroke. We also proposed some strategies of rehabilitation using this system based on Virtual Reality. In this paper, Virtual Reality (VR) was adapted in this system in which the water simulation provided fundamental environment for rehabilitation training and we used a haptic device (Phantom Omni) and an inertial sensor (MTx) to implement tasks proposed. In this paper, three types of tasks were designed so that comprehensive analyses of performance would be obtained. As preliminary phase, five healthy subjects were invited to participate in experiments. The experimental results showed that the virtual force model was effective for the upper limbs rehabilitation and the subjects showed improvement during the experiment. Though there is some limitation due to the haptic device, this system is promising, because strategies proposed are potential to be used in real rehabilitation.