College of Information Science and Technology and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine Information Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 510632, China.
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
J Neuroeng Rehabil. 2021 Nov 27;18(1):166. doi: 10.1186/s12984-021-00957-6.
The transfer of the behaviors of a human's upper limbs to an avatar is widely used in the field of virtual reality rehabilitation. To perform the transfer, movement tracking technology is required. Traditionally, wearable tracking devices are used for tracking; however, these devices are expensive and cumbersome. Recently, non-wearable upper-limb tracking solutions have been proposed, which are less expensive and more comfortable. However, most products cannot track the upper limbs, including the arms and all the fingers at the same time, which limits the limb parts for tracking in a virtual environment and may lead to a limited rehabilitation effect.
In this paper, a novel virtual reality rehabilitation system (VRRS) was developed for upper-limb rehabilitation. The VRRS could track the motion of both upper limbs, integrate fine finger motion and the range of motion of the entire arm and map the motion to an avatar. To test the performance of VRRS, two experiments were designed. In the first experiment, we investigated the effect of VRRS on virtual body ownership, agency and location of the body and usability in 8 healthy participants by comparing it with a partial upper-limb tracking method based on a Leap Motion controller (LP) in the same virtual environments. In the second experiment, we examined the feasibility of VRRS in upper-limb rehabilitation with 27 stroke patients.
VRRS improved the users' senses of body ownership, agency, and location of the body. The users preferred using the VRRS to using the LP. In addition, we found that although the upper limb motor function of patients from all groups was improved, the difference between the FM scores tested on the first day and the last day of the experimental group was more significant than that of the control groups.
A VRRS with motion tracking of the upper limbs and avatar control including the arms and all the fingers was developed. It resulted in an improved user experience of embodiment and effectively improved the effects of upper limb rehabilitation in stroke patients.
The study was registered at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University Identifier: KY-2020-036; Date of registration: June 01, 2020.
人类上肢行为的转移在虚拟现实康复领域得到了广泛应用。为了实现这种转移，需要运动跟踪技术。传统上，使用可穿戴跟踪设备进行跟踪；然而，这些设备昂贵且笨重。最近，提出了非穿戴式上肢跟踪解决方案，这些解决方案价格较低且更舒适。但是，大多数产品无法同时跟踪上肢，包括手臂和所有手指，这限制了在虚拟环境中进行跟踪的肢体部位，可能导致康复效果有限。
本文开发了一种用于上肢康复的新型虚拟现实康复系统（VRRS）。该 VRRS 可以跟踪两个上肢的运动，集成精细手指运动和整个手臂的运动范围，并将运动映射到虚拟人身上。为了测试 VRRS 的性能，设计了两个实验。在第一个实验中，我们通过将其与基于 Leap Motion 控制器（LP）的部分上肢跟踪方法在相同的虚拟环境中进行比较，调查了 VRRS 对虚拟身体所有权、代理和身体位置以及可用性的影响，实验对象为 8 名健康参与者。在第二个实验中，我们用 27 名中风患者检验了 VRRS 在上肢康复中的可行性。
VRRS 改善了用户的身体所有权、代理和身体位置感。用户更喜欢使用 VRRS 而不是 LP。此外，我们发现，尽管所有组的患者上肢运动功能均有所改善，但实验组在实验第一天和最后一天测试的 FM 评分之间的差异比对照组更为显著。
我们开发了一种具有上肢运动跟踪和包括手臂和所有手指在内的虚拟人控制功能的 VRRS，这不仅改善了用户的体验感，还有效地提高了中风患者上肢康复的效果。
该研究在暨南大学第一附属医院注册，标识符：KY-2020-036；注册日期：2020 年 6 月 1 日。
