Interactive Physiotherapy: An Application Based on Virtual Reality and Bio-feedback

Physiotherapy is a rehabilitation specialty that helps alleviate physical impairments and promotes patient’s mobility and quality of life. It consists of equipment and personnel to provide mechanically forced movements and various exercises that help retain and enhance motor movements in patients suffering from physical injuries or ailments like Parkinson’s disease, Arthritis, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Stroke, etc. This paper proposes an entertaining way to perform routine exercises, which do not require physical intervention, by packaging them into a Virtual Reality (VR) game environment for such patients to enhance joint and muscle mobility while also providing continuous monitoring of vital signs using Bio-sensors. The game provides various degrees of muscle exercises and Microsoft Kinect (Optical Sensor) is used to track patient’s skeletal movements. Prompt measures are also provided if the data from Bio-sensors (mounted on patient’s body and connected wirelessly to the processing unit) starts to deviate from medically accepted normal ranges. We have developed the prototype using Unity 3D alongwith the VR headset Oculus Rift. The proposed prototype has immense significance in the field of rehabilitation and improving quality of daily life activities for the elderly. While experimenting with the prototype it was found that the used Bio-sensors provided an error no greater than one unit of measurement, which is negligible for the purpose of physiotherapy exercise monitoring considering the span of the normal range values. Moreover, the Kinect provided an error of just 5 mm during skeletal measurements thereby engendering robust deployment of the proposed unit.