Design and implementation of patient specific virtual reality systems for motor rehabilitation

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002918

There is a need for low-cost, in-home rehabilitation systems with increasing numbers of strokes per year. Therefore a virtual reality system for home use in rehabilitation of the hand and wrist that included hardware, middleware, and software was created and tested with healthy subjects. The Angle Tracking and Location At-home System (ATLAS) was created with potentiome-ter bend sensors to track finger angle and inertial measurement units (IMUs) to track hand orientation and position. To facilitate the communication between the ATLAS and a computer the Device Agnostic Virtual Environment (DAVE) was created as the middleware solution. Patient specific virtual environments have been created for the ATLAS with the goal of increasing sub-ject motivation and outcomes. The ATLAS was found to fit the requirements for a low-cost, in home system for motor rehabilitation.