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Home
Urban Cognition
MBTA Upzone+
Virtual Vitality
Dogs’ Journey
Boundary of Heterotopia
Heritage Extension
Architecture
Bamboo Dome
Professional Works
About Me
Virtual Vitality
A VR-Gamified Physical Therapy Tool for Stroke PatientsMIT 2.177 Designing Virtual World
[Date]
2023.10- 2023.12
[Location]
Cambridge, MA
[Team Member]
Hadeel Abdo, Bethanie Liu, Pierre Lonni, Xinyi Tang
[Keywords]
Virtual Reality, Hand Tracking, Physical Therapy
Virtual Vitality (Github) is a VR-gamified physical therapy tool that helps stroke patients regain their finger movement abilities. The game uses Meta Quest’s built-in hand motion capture to show users’ hands in different VR environments, where physiotherapy is turned into a music game in which users pinch their fingers in response to objects popping up on their individual fingers and creating a melody.
Our team has identified 2 main limitations in conventional physiotherapy practices:
1. Monotonous and repetitive approaches
2. Progress takes time, and the long-term commitment often makes patients feel defeated or lack motivation over time
Reflecting on those observations, we decided that this would be an excellent concept to implement in Virtual Reality/Extended Reality as its high potential to increase interactivity could be beneficial to leverage. While a lot of hospitals and clinics have been trying to incorporate entertainment into their rehabilitation programs, a lot of them are just providing TV screens for patients to distract themselves while they carry out their rehab exercises, resulting in a single-way input of entertainment for them.
Building up on that lack of intractability, our project creates a two-way communication where patients can look at the soothing landscape in their headset and listen to the music and at the same time, jam and play along to the music. From our observations, we believe that entertainment is the most effective when the user is involved in the creation process, and in our case, users will be majorly involved in the music creation process. This will also help a lot with distracting patients from pain and the dull nature of physiotherapy.
We also think that visualizing patients’ hands in the game, through VR, will create an immensely more exciting and engaging physiotherapy experience. Furthermore, through the design of soothing natural landscapes and their incorporation in immersive VR, we hope to reduce the stress levels of the patients when they do not perform as well as they wanted.
Hand Tracking - Pinching
Two Soothing Natural Landscapes - Forest & Ocean