CHALLENGES AND ISSUES FOR SUCCESSFULLY APPLYING VIRTUAL REALITY IN MEDICAL REHABILITATION

Out of the many uses of eLearning one that stands out for having a potentially great impact on the quality of life of its users is relearning physical and psychical abilities that were lost after acute illnesses or injuries through rehabilitation processes. Such disabilities are a great burden on the patient, on his caregivers, and on society. Simple everyday tasks represent a challenge and the patient must learn again gestures that seemed habitual before the accident. Amongst the various sciences and technologies that have been used in order to improve the classical rehabilitation processes, Virtual Reality seems to be one of the most promising. Virtual Reality is an emerging science in the field of rehabilitation, that is gaining more and more uses, due to its great advantages, such as stimulating movement and cerebral activity, increasing attention levels and simulation various environments that enhance the rehabilitation sessions. The fact that VR technologies are not yet used on a large scale in rehabilitation is due to certain disadvantages that are limiting its adoption in every specialized clinic or rehabilitation centre. Despite its many benefits, Virtual Reality in rehabilitation also has notable disadvantages that result from it using state of the art technology such as: cost-related issues, issues generated by the human-computer interfaces that it uses, which may seem unnatural for first time users, immersion issues may influence the quality of the rehabilitation process, and also compatibility issues between various devices may arise. Virtual Reality systems usually process large amounts of data, thus need processing and storage capacity. Also, many VR systems users reported side effects that cannot be ignored, as they may have an impact on the quality of the rehabilitation process but may also bring legal and ethical issues. In order to be widely adopted, VR rehabilitation must bring an obvious and secure improvement to the patient, creating an attractive price/benefit ratio. Also, the expectations of the patient must be aligned to the possibilities that the technology offers and the practitioners must be tutored in using such systems in order to obtain the most benefits. In this article we will review the most important disadvantages as well as analyze possible solutions for overcoming them. The solutions may be available at the present moment, or may require that the technology progresses, but the key factor seems to be cost related, as lowering the costs of VR technology would allow more users to access its features, some as end users and some as potential developers, allowing them to discover and correct the shortcomings of VR applications and devices.

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