VR Aided Motor Training for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation: System Design, Clinical Test, Methodology for Evaluation

This paper describes interdisciplinary work on developing a virtual reality (VR) aided motor training task for post-stroke rehabilitation on functional deficits of the upper extremity: static reaching. Patient-specific and human-centered design of the VR system was addressed from the physical therapist´s perspective. The two main features of the system were that it could actively drive the human kinetic behavior based on the therapist´s rehabilitation goals and capture the patient´s kinetic performance in an accurate way. A three-month clinical trial of this VR task was conducted with five post-stroke patients. To analyze the collected data, a methodology was proposed to visualize the patient´s current status and progression over time based on three kinematics measures: performance time, movement efficiency, and moving speed. Results from the analysis clearly reveal the current status of the patient´s hand and arm movement with respect to his/her range of motion, comprising pitch, yaw and arm length. Further, evidence of progress was found and visualized quantitatively over a series of practice sessions. Along with several conventional behavioral assessments at three points: pre-training, mid-training and post-training, the patient´s progress was identified as well. Finally, human factors, such as perception of difficulty, confidence of movement, and system usability, were measured and studied.