A two-arm coordination model for phantom limb pain rehabilitation

Abstract

Following limb loss, patients usually continue having sensations on their missing limbs as if they were still present. Significant amount of such sensations are painful and referred as Phantom Limb Pain (PLP). Previous research has shown that providing the patient with the visual feedback of a limb at the place of the missing one in Virtual Reality (VR) can reduce PLP. In this paper we introduce a model to coordinate the arms allowing the exercising of a much broader range of reach tasks for alleviating the PLP more efficiently. Our Two-Arm Coordination Model (TACM) synthesizes the missing limb pose from the instantaneous variations of the intact opposite limb for a given reach task. Moreover, we propose a setup that makes use of a virtual mirror to enhance the full-body awareness of the patient in the virtual space.