Illusion Approach for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation

Taking the advantage of human brain plasticity nature, Augmented Reality (AR) based Illusion System (ARIS) for upper limb rehabilitation has developed. The ARIS aims to restore the lost functions of upper limb due to various motor injuries. It incorporates with AR technology to build up the upper limb rehabilitation exercise and computer vision with color recognition technique to comply “Fool-the-Brain” concept for fast recovery of neural impairments. The upper limb exercise that developed in ARIS is to promote the impaired arm range of motion by moving along the predefined trajectory of the AR based exercise. In ARIS, the real impaired arm will be overlapped by the virtual arm throughout the rehabilitation exercise to create the illusion scene. In the case of real arm cannot perform the required task, virtual arm will take over the job of real one and will let the user to perceive the sense that he/she is still able to perform the reaching movement by own effort to the destination point which is the main idea of ARIS. The validation of ARIS was conducted as a preliminary stage and the outcome are discussed.