Development of VR system for home gait training with multimodal feedback

Abstract

We have developed a virtual reality (VR) system for home gait training of stroke patients, which provides visual, auditory, and tactile feedback upon collision with objects such as walls and furniture. The current study recruited young healthy individuals to test the effect of multimodal feedback on the number of collisions with objects, walking speed, and the number of steps in the gait test in the virtual home environment. Four times of consecutive gait training with multimodal feedback and those without feedback both resulted in moderate and non-significant improvement of the gait parameters. This is possibly due to the high gait function in the current participants and the limited statistical power due to the small number of participants. In the future, we would further increase the number of subjects and examine the effectiveness of VR gait training with multisensory feedback.