Performance evaluation of a VR-based arm rehabilitation using movement sequence pattern

Every year, 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke, nearly six million die and another five million are left permanently disabled. Stroke therapy cost time and money while some prove inefficient because it takes time for the treatment to show result. Virtual Reality technology is currently widely applied in physical rehabilitation therapy. This research discusses the use of virtual reality game for arm rehabilitation of post stroke patients. Microsoft Kinect sensor and game engine Unity software use as the development tools to design the virtual reality game. In this study, three arm movement sequence patterns consist of object reaching, arm lifting, grab and release movements was design for the virtual reality game. A healthy volunteer subject was involved to evaluate the performance of the virtual reality game. The result shows that, in VR-based arm rehabilitation using motion sequence pattern 1, the completion time has been improved after three trials where in the last trial, the time taken by the subject to complete the task has been reduced to 10 seconds compare to first trial. Arm rehabilitation using motion sequence pattern 2 also shows improvement where after the third trial, subject was able to complete the task within 18 seconds, which is 14 seconds faster than the first trial whereas in the third movement sequence pattern the time taken to complete the task improves from 20 seconds in the first trial to 14 seconds in the last trial. The questionnaire outcome reveals rehabilitation games show a potential to provide fun, less tiresome, motivation, interesting, safe, and easy to understand rehabilitation activity.