Physical Rehabilitation based on Smart Wearable and Virtual Reality Serious Game
Ricardo Alexandre, Octavian Adrian Postolache, Pedro Silva Girão · 2019
The paper describes a solution for physical rehabilitation of upper limbs based on Virtual Reality (VR) therapeutic serious games and IoT wearable devices expressed by smart sensors embedded in a headband and two gloves. The implemented smart sensors are based in Arduino Nano platform connected to an IMU 9DOF module. In the case of smart gloves, a set of force and flexion sensors (FlexiForce & FlexSensors 2.2) were considered to provide information about the finger flexion and finger force contact. The communication between the wearable modules and the virtual reality computation platform is performed using Bluetooth communication protocol. A software was developed and includes the VR serious games for hands and fingers rehabilitation. A Web API was used to store and process the data acquired by the sensors and to extract information about user physical capabilities and limitations during the training. A cross-platform mobile application was developed for user electronic record including training data visualization purposes. Experimental data obtained during the rehabilitation sessions, including metrics evolution that characterize upper limb and finger motion, are included in the article.