Attention Enhancement and Motion Assistance for Virtual Reality-Mediated Upper-Limb Rehabilitation

Dysfunctions of upper limbs caused by diseases such as stroke result in difficulties in conducting day-to-day activities. Studies show that rehabilitation training using virtual reality games is helpful for patients to restore arm functions. It has been found that ensuring active patient participation and effort devoting in the process is very important to obtain better training results. This article introduces a method to help patients increase their engagement and provide motion assistance in virtual reality-mediated upper-limb rehabilitation training. Attention enhancement and motion assistance is achieved through an illusion of virtual forces created by altering the drag speed between the cursor and the object presented on a screen to the patient as the only feedback. We present two game forms using the proposed method, including a target-approaching game and a maze-following game. The results of evaluation experiments with human participants showed that the proposed method could provide path guidance that significantly improved path-following performance of users and required more involvement of the users when compared to playing the game without attention enhancement and motion assistance

Remote sensing technologies for physiotherapy assessment

The paper presents a set of remote, unobtrusive sensing technologies that can be used in upper and lower limbs rehabilitation monitoring. The advantages of using sensors based on microwave Doppler radar or infrared technologies for physiotherapy assessment are discussed. These technologies allow motion sensing at distance from monitored subject, reducing thus the discomfort produced by some wearable technologies for limbs movement assessment. The microwave radar that may be easily hidden into environment by nonmetallic parts allows remote sensing of human motion, providing information on user movements characteristics and patterns. The infrared technologies - infrared LEDs from Leap-Motion, infrared laser from Kinect depth sensor, and infrared thermography can be used for different movements' parameters evaluation. Visible for users, Leap-motion and Kinect sensors assure higher accuracy on body parts movements' detection at low computation load. These technologies are commonly used for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) scenarios, in which the user motion patterns and the muscular activity might be analyzed. Thermography can be employed to evaluate the muscular loading. Muscular activity during movements training in physiotherapy can be estimated through skin temperature measurement before and after physical training. Issues related to the considered remote sensing technologies such as VR serious game for motor rehabilitation, signal processing and experimental results associated with microwave radar, infrared sensors and thermography for physiotherapy sensing are included in the paper.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

MIFTel: a multimodal interactive framework based on temporal logic rules

Human-computer and multimodal interaction are increasingly used in everyday life. Machines are able to get more from the surrounding world, assisting humans in different application areas. In this context, the correct processing and management of signals provided by the environments is determinant for structuring the data. Different sources and acquisition times can be exploited for improving recognition results. On the basis of these assumptions, we are proposing a multimodal system that exploits Allen’s temporal logic combined with a prevision method. The main object is to correlate user’s events with system’s reactions. After post-elaborating coming data from different signal sources (RGB images, depth maps, sounds, proximity sensors, etc.), the system is managing the correlations between recognition/detection results and events in real-time to create an interactive environment for the user. For increasing the recognition reliability, a predictive model is also associated with the proposed method. The modularity of the system grants a full dynamic development and upgrade with custom modules. Finally, a comparison with other similar systems is shown, underlining the high flexibility and robustness of the proposed event management method