Towards Continuous Patient Care with Remote Guided VR-Therapy

Abstract

The biomechanically complex hand is crucial to a person's daily life and enables grasping, manipulating objects, and many more tasks. Impairments have a strong impact on a person's independence, quality of life, and overall well-being. Physiotherapy plays a crucial role after surgical interventions. Given the shortage of personnel and therapy session availability, enabling support and monitoring during the absence of the physiotherapist is a key future direction of medical care. Virtual reality (VR) has been shown to be able to support the rehabilitation of hand motor function. However, an individualized and motivating rehabilitation process is crucial to support the affected person until full recovery of the hand function. To address this, we present a prototype of a VR rehabilitation system that allows for the medical expert to a) control exercise planning and to b) receive a detailed report on the patients success. Our rehabilitation assistant is based on a gamified approach that targets the execution of crucial gestures for exercise.