That’s All Folks!

Our Demola project is now almost over, just some final tweaking of the deliverables is still on the to-do list. The pitch went really well and we were awarded the second best Demola team this season. Finishing in second place out of 27 teams is of course not a bad accomplishment by any means, but it was still a slight disappointment since winning was our goal. But that’s life.

At least we got a consolation award.

This blog was intended to serve as a look behind the scenes of our project, and because the project is now coming to an end, this will probably be the last post. Thanks to everyone who has been following our journey! According to the blog statistics there has been quite a few of you.

As I wrote earlier, the story of VR Rehab is just starting now. We will make rehabilitation fun. That’s a promise.

— Ville

The End Is Near

There’s just two days left until the final pitching event is here. We’ve been putting lots of work and effort over the past weeks to fine-tune our product to offer a good-looking, easy-to-use and unique experience for rehabilitation patients. Now when the project is coming to its end, all I can say is that I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved so far. After all the positive feedback we’ve received, I’m convinced that our product has the potential to change the lives of lots of people for the better.

The big problem with traditional rehabilitation is that the exercises tend to be rather boring, which leads to many people just not doing them often enough. This is something we wanted to change. Our motto is “making rehabilitation fun”, which describes our main goal rather well. If rehabilitation is something you have to partake in, why couldn’t it be enjoyable and motivating?

The balance game we did is pretty awesome, but our focus is in the future. As I wrote in one of our previous posts, the “real” VR headsets with hand tracking controllers will be released to the consumer market in the coming months, and the possibilities they offer for rehabilitation purposes are pretty much limitless. And that’s what VR Rehab will be about: creating a collection of games and experiences that make rehabilitation fun, and a platform that stores patient information and all their progress statistics.

Even though our Demola project is now almost finished, the story of VR Rehab is just starting. We’re aiming at nothing less than a complete rehabilitation revolution. Who will be the people behind it after this project, that’s another question.

— Ville

A Short Update

Last week we tested our game with two patients at Pirkanmaan Erikoiskuntoutus, a rehabilitation center in Tampere. Joel Väyrynen, who has had balance problems since a cerebral hemorrhage, and Pirjo Nuutinen, who suffered a spinal cord injury after a car accident, were our test subjects. The feedback we got was overall very positive, and it made me really happy to hear that our little game was seen to have a lot of potential in making rehabilitation more fun and motivating. I have nothing against games made purely for entertainment purposes, but working on games that can genuinely make a difference in many people’s daily lives is what inspires me the most.

We have a couple of weeks remaining of our Demola project, so we’re now trying to make the user experience even better based on the feedback we got, adding some new features along the way. On top of that we’ll also work on the user interface for the therapists, try to come up with other concepts for games and experiences and create an introductory website for our product.

— Ville

Pirjo Nuutinen

Joel Väyrynen

Something Old and Something New

As I wrote last time, neglect patients will be a very challenging user group because of many reasons. And after doing some testing and getting valuable feedback, this group turned out to be a bit too challenging to be the main target, which was not a big surprise really.

We made a demo of a game that utilizes the head rotation tracking capabilities of Gear VR, where the patients get points from focusing their gaze on different objects (animals only at the moment) for a certain amount of time, and the therapist can choose to modify these objects: their sizes, the places where they appear and the speed and direction they are moving at. All this was supposed to help in diagnosing and rehabilitating neglect patients in a fun way. We certainly didn’t throw this idea in the trash can, but instead decided to modify it a bit.

The idea of the game stayed the same, but the main target groups we’re now focusing at are patients who have problems with their balance and patients who need to strengthen and stretch their core, which is done by rotating the torso. Special features for neglect patients will be added when everything else is ready. I think a video speaks more than words in this case, so please have a look:

One more big change we decided on was to broaden the concept from just one game to a full virtual reality platform for therapists. This platform will function as a hub where therapists can easily search for games that help in the rehabilitation of different disabilities. It also stores patient information, their favorite games and statistics on how well they’ve performed over time.

The game repertory will grow in size when new games are made. At the moment the only available virtual reality headsets on the consumer market are mobile devices which don’t allow for any hand or body tracking, but in the coming months this situation will change and our platform will be ready to feature even these more advanced headsets. We are sure that hand tracking will offer a lot of new possibilities for rehabilitation purposes in the near future.

I’d also like to consider replacing the word game with experience. In addition to games, experiences can be for example videos or different interactive ways of storytelling. One target group for these experiences could be patients that have to spend large amounts of time indoors. Here’s one of our visualizations for the concept:

At the moment I’m really enthusiastic about the way our project is heading so stay tuned for coming updates!

— Ville

More About Hemispatial Neglect

As a physiotherapist in the group, the last few weeks were dedicated to the research about how virtual reality was already used in rehabilitation. Before I signed up to the Demola project, I was working with virtual reality in rehabilitation centers. There we used Wii Fit games with a Wii Balance Board  under patients legs to help people with balance impairment. People got excited and wanted to beat their previous score, they came to therapy with a smile and exercised longer because they wanted to improve. Because the best rehabilitation happens when a patient is prepared to work and is motivated to get better, I think virtual reality helps patients to recover faster and also makes physiotherapists job easier.

Source: http://howsyourrobot.com/2013/04/24/let-me-get-this-straight-you-want-me-to-play-video-games/

Other common uses of virtual reality are rehabilitation for upper extremity and hand (stroke victims, people with restricted movement of the arm – women after mastectomy, older people, different injuries of the shoulder…), different memory games for patients with dementia, virtual reality for walking (the program motivates patients to walk faster) and games for patients with hemispatial neglect.

Source: http://mag.rehabfun.com/tag/virtual-reality-rehabilitation-system/

Because stroke a big problem in the first world countries and it demands a long and difficult rehabilitation, we wanted to focus on that. We thought the best way to do it would be an application where the patient would have to use their hands. This is also where our first problem occurred: we needed to change the glasses we were using and hand tracking was not possible anymore.

With a little brainstorming we then decided that we will now focus on hemispatial neglect, which is a common condition with patients who had a stroke. The main characteristic is deficit in attention and awareness of one side of space is observed. With virtual reality we will try to make the patient focus on the side of the space that he is neglecting and increase awareness.

I would love to tell more but for now that is all I can give away. In the next blogs we will show first glimpses of our application so keep reading!

— Tanja

About Us

Using virtual reality technology, in our case Samsung Gear VR, we want to provide an outside experience for rehabilitation patients that cannot explore the real world themselves due to their limitations. In addition, with simple exercises and diagnosis tools for patients with hemispatial neglect, they will have more motivation to continue their treatment, thus decreasing the costs and length of the rehabilitation.

For this project our team has six members. To achieve good results we needed different skills, therefore we have a multidisciplinary team. In addition, we are also a multicultural team, as we have members from various countries.

Who are we? What are our responsibilities?

Fernanda: I was born in Brazil and currently I am studying International business in Tampere, Finland, at TAMK.I am the project manager of this project. Among other types of assistance, my main responsibility is to be the contact between the client and the group. I want to use my studies for a real project with an important purpose that can actually be useful for people. For instance, make the rehabilitation process more enjoyable  and less frustrating.

Paavo Happonen: My role in the project is to consult with my previous VR and Unity experience, do some coding and help with stuff when necessary. My hope is that we come up with some interesting VR application.

 

Yanlin Qian: My role in our group is a programmer, helping Paavo to build a whole VR application. I can also some data analyse job if needed. My hope is that combining my major knowledge like data processing, we can do something worthful and with good value.

Ville Lahtinen: I’m a human-technology interaction student, so I’ll be focusing on the user experience and visual looks of the application. I’ll also try to help Paavo and Yanlin with the coding part whenever needed. I want to create something cool, awesome and epic.

Tanja Krevelj: I am studying physiotherapy, and because my knowledge of functional anatomy, anatomy, neurology, physiology and pathology of human body, my role in this project is advising the group on correct movements that they could use in the application. My personal goals are learning more about virtual reality and use it to create application that would be beneficial to the patients with movement restrictions. I expect to create a game that would be as beneficial to the patient from physiotherapist perspective as possible

Kim Hokkanen: I’m a registered practical nurse and currently study nursing at TAMK. I have experience in working with physiotherapists and patients with various rehabilitation needs. My previous work experience in programming and technical documentation will also be beneficial here. I’ll work with Tanja on the health aspect, and with the programming team to decide what data needs to be collected and how to analyse and present it so it’s useful for the therapist. On the programming side I’ll mostly do debugging and documentation, although I might write a line or two of original code. I look forward to working with VR, and learning Unity and the necessary skills to complete the project.

Challenges and Expectations

So the focus of our project is the rehabilitation of hemispatial neglect, which results usually from a brain injury such as stroke. As brain injuries often alter thinking and behavior, this means that the patients who will be our end users will have very large divergence in their cognitive capabilities. Also the average age of the users will be pretty high, as two thirds of strokes occur in those over 65 years old.

Our team having a brainstorming session in Demola

We haven’t yet had a chance to meet any potential end users, though hopefully this will change very soon. Yet already it is obvious that the main user group will be a very challenging crowd. It could be argued that user experience is the most important factor in any project, but especially now this claim rings true. The device we have is really immersive, so if the experience isn’t pleasant enough, it could easily scare away people not accustomed to technology.

Developing a virtual reality rehabilitation environment for mostly old people with brain injuries is not something you get to do too often, which means that I am very excited about this project. Our simple mission will be to create as good a user experience as possible, and of course a tool that is useful and effective for rehabilitation purposes. I’m pretty sure we’ll succeed at this and come up with something totally awesome. In one of our next blog posts we’ll present some of the ideas we’ve already started working on.

— Ville

Tools and Goals

Our project is titled Rehabilitation Using Virtual Reality. Our project partner is Vincit, and they’ve provided us a Samsung Gear VR device to work with. It is currently the only piece of hardware we’re using in addition to the computers we’re programming the environment and the software with. The headset comes with a very accurate and responsive head tracking and works well within the goals we’ve set this far. Wireless operation is a huge plus as it will allow the VR environment to be used anywhere.

Samsung Gear VR on Yanlin, side

Samsung Gear VR on Yanlin, front

Rehabilitation comes in many forms. While VR could ostensibly be used in many different fields, we plan on focusing in diagnosis and rehabilitation of hemispatial neglect. While a patient is going through exercises in our virtual environment, the software is gathering data and provides useful information for the therapist, allowing him to better control and plan exercises for that patient.

I expect that the project goal gets more refined as we go along. I’m prepared for trouble – I see many potential problems in the horizon, some of which I’m hopeful I have an idea how to solve. Most of the problems will appear once we have an initial working prototype and get to test the VR environment with actual patients – which is something I hope we get to do. Developing this without their input would be an almost insurmountable challenge as the condition itself could pose problems we can’t conceive.

Despite the long and rocky road ahead, I’m forging on with excitement. This will be a great tool for rehab!

— Kim