The construction of a Haptic application in a Virtual Environment as a post Stroke arm Rehabilitation exercise

Abstract: This thesis describes a six-month project based on stroke rehabilitation and involves designing with medical doctors, a physiotherapist and an occupational therapist, prototyping and evaluating with both stroke patients and other users. Our project involves the construction of a rehabilitation exercise system, based on virtual environments (VE) and haptics, designed for stroke patients. Our system uses a commercially available haptic device called the PHANTOM Omni, which has the possibility of being used as a rehabilitationm tool to interact with virtual environments. The PHANTOM Omni is used in combination with our own developed software based on the platform H3D API. Our goal is to construct an application which will motivate the stroke patient to start using their arm again. We give a review of the different aspects of stroke, rehabilitation, VE and haptics and how these have previously been combined. We describe our findings from our literature studies and from informal interviews with medical personnel. From these conclusions we attempt to take the research area further by suggesting and evaluating designs of different games/genres that can be used with the PHANTOM Omni as possible haptic exercises for post-stroke arm rehabilitation. We then present two different implementations to show how haptic games can be constructed. We mainly focus on an application we built, a game, using an iterative design process based on studies conducted during the project, called "The Labyrinth". The game is used to show many of the different aspects that have to be taken into account when designing haptic games for stroke patients. From a study with three stroke patients we have seen that "The Labyrinth" has the potential of being a stimulating, encouraging and fun exercise complement to the traditional rehabilitation. Through the design process and knowledge we acquired during this thesis we have created a set of general design guidelines that we believe can help in the future software development of haptic games for post-stroke arm rehabilitation.