Haptic Augmented Reality to monitor human arm's stiffness in rehabilitation

Augmented Reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are overlaid by virtual, computer generated objects. In this paper, AR is combined with haptics in order to observe human arm's stiffness. A haptic, hand-held device is used to measure the human arm's impedance. While a computer vision system tracks and records the position of the hand, a computer screen displays the impedance diagrams superimposed on the hand in a real-time video feed. The visual augmentation is also performed using a video projector that project's the diagrams on the hand as it moves. © 2012 IEEE

Haptic Augmented Reality to monitor human arm's stiffness in rehabilitation

Augmented Reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are overlaid by virtual, computer generated objects. In this paper, AR is combined with haptics in order to observe human arm's stiffness. A haptic, hand-held device is used to measure the human arm's impedance. While a computer vision system tracks and records the position of the hand, a computer screen displays the impedance diagrams superimposed on the hand in a real-time video feed. The visual augmentation is also performed using a video projector that project's the diagrams on the hand as it moves. © 2012 IEEE

Free-hand interaction with leap motion controller for stroke rehabilitation

In recent years, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been advanced with many technologies, however, most are limited to healthy users. In this paper, we leveraged the technology of free-hand interaction to rehabilitate patients with stroke. We modified the game of Fruit Ninja to use Leap Motion controller's hand tracking data for stroke patients with arm and hand weakness to practice their finger individuation. In a pilot study, we recruited 14 patients with chronic stroke to play the game using natural interaction. Their Fruit Ninja (FN) scores show high correlation with the standard clinical assessment scores such as Fugl-Meyer (FMA) and Box-and-Blocks Test (BBT) scores. This finding suggests that our freehand Fruit Ninja's score is a good indicator of the patient's hand function and therefore will be informative if used in their rehabilitation

Comparing direct and indirect interaction in stroke rehabilitation

We explore the differences of direct (DI) vs. indirect (IDI) interaction in stroke rehabilitation. Direct interaction is when the patients move their arms in reaction to changes in the augmented physical environment; indirect interaction is when the patients move their arms in reaction to changes on a computer screen. We developed a rehabilitation game in both settings evaluated by a within-subject study with 10 patients with chronic stroke, aiming to answer 2 major questions: (i) do the game scores in either of the two interaction modes correlate with clinical assessment scores? and (ii) whether performance is different using direct versus indirect interaction in patients with stroke. Our experimental results confirm higher performance in use of DI over IDI. They also suggest better correlation of DI and clinical scores. Our study provides evidence for the benefits of direct interaction therapies vs. indirect computer-assisted therapies in stroke rehabilitation