Rehabilitative game-based system for enhancing physical and cognitive abilities of neurological disorders.

Abstract

Neurological disorders affect the nervous system and can impair physical, cognitive, or emotional functions. They often result in challenges such as movement difficulties and the inability to perform daily activities. Common conditions include stroke, traumatic brain injury, and cerebral palsy. Physical therapy is a common approach to managing these disorders. Recently, virtual reality (VR), a technology that creates interactive, simulated environments, has been used in rehabilitation. This study presents a rehabilitative game-based system to improve patients' movements and cognitive abilities. Six games were designed using the Unity platform, namely, "Piano," "Connect," "Drag & Drop," "Little Intelligent," "Memory," and "Hack & Slash." The Oculus Quest 2 VR headset was used to simulate the virtual environment for gaming. A mobile application called "Recover Me" was created to facilitate communication between patients and physiotherapists. A score index was generated for each patient, indicating the performance. It enables monitoring and assessment of the patients, leading to customizing the treatment plan based on progress. The study proposed simulating monitoring and evaluation of the patients by training an artificial neural network model to predict scores for the developed games and consequently indicate the patient's actual status. A dataset of 50 patients with different injuries was used. Results indicate patient satisfaction with gaming and enjoyment. Moreover, a regression analysis was performed to detect the progress level of each patient, indicating that 60% of the tested patients had improved. A low-cost VR game-based system has proven effective in rehabilitating neurological disorders.