MoMiReS: Mobile mixed reality system for physical & occupational therapies for hand and wrist ailments

Abstract

The MoMiReS is a mobile mixed reality system aimed at physical and occupational therapies. The goal of the system is to engage therapy patients by involving them in a fun to play 3D game environment through physical interactions with a wireless sensor glove. Our system offers a solution for rehabilitation of the hand, wrist originated problems with a smartphone based mobile mixed reality game that will be used in conjunction with traditional rehabilitation programs such as home treatment. The key factor in the success of the home treatment is compliance of patients to the given therapy instructions. However, therapists report that patients do not carry on their home-exercises and activities. The main reason is the lack of motivation and boredom for the given activities. These activities require patients to carry out set of repetitive movements. The lack of motivation in exercises causes discontinuity and increases the recovery time and eventually increases the cost of the treatment. Therefore, we propose a complete framework by reducing the drawbacks of the traditional therapy. Our framework has three components; hardware, smartphone game, and cloud for data storage and processing. A sensor glove was developed with plug and play motion sensors streamed in real-time to the mobile phone with Bluetooth connection. The glove is used for tracking finger pressures and motion of the fingers. The patient side smartphone based interactive game verifies compliance of the motions for assigned exercises by occupational/physical therapist. The cloud side aims at ensuring patients that the assigned exercises are carried out and also monitors patient in real-time. Cloud application keeps the record of the patients' progresses for further analysis by therapists. In order to understand the effectiveness of the proposed system, we developed games specifically for treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome. The usability and effectiveness of the systems are surveyed among the occupational therapy students. Survey results show that 92% approval rate of the system.