Virtual Environments for Hand Rehabilitation with Force Feedback

Within recent years, an increasing number of researches that leverage virtual reality (VR) applications to improve motor rehabilitation have been conducted. These computer-based tools to various degrees help with motor rehabilitation for hand/arm impairment. Compared to the conventional therapy, people are more engaged and interested when they are being trained with the VR, leading to equal or higher improvements in terms of functional use of the hand/arm. In this paper, a VR-based platform for hand/arm rehabilitation is developed using delta3d, an open-source game and simulation engine of high-level interfaces to graphics and physics libraries. The platform provides not only visual information but also force feedback to users. Contrasted to previous similar researches, the contact force is directly extracted from the physics engine through virtual sensors. The effectiveness of virtual sensors is experimentally validated, and the relationship between joint angles and contact forces over time is presented. Finally, a training paradigm for hand impairment patients is proposed for future validation.