A new VR bike system for balance rehabilitation training

Describes a bike system for the postural balance rehabilitation training. A virtual environment and three dimensional graphic models are designed with CAD tools such as 3D Studio Max^TM and World Up ^TM. For the real time bike simulation, the optimized WTK graphic library is embedded with the dynamic geometry generation method, multi-thread method, and portal generation method. In an experiment, 20 normal adults were tested to investigate the influencing factors of balancing posture. We evaluated the system by measuring the parameters such as path deviation, driving velocity, COP, and average weight shift. Also, we investigated the usefulness of visual feedback information by weight shift. The results showed that visual stimulus of continuous visual feedback by weight shift way more effective than that of non-visual feedback in the postural balance control. It is concluded that this system might be applied in clinical use as a postural balance training system