A1-4 Development of a NeuroRehabilitation System for Phantom Limb Pain Using Multimodal Virtual Reality and its Clinical Application

Abstract

Following amputation, patients often report severe pain in the vivid phantom awareness of their lost limbs, which is called as phantom limb pain (PLP). Some researchers have treated PLP with providing the visual images of the lost limbs to the patients by using a mirror. We extended this paradigm to the multimodal (visual, auditory and tactile) Virtual Reality (VR) system to provide more efficient images of the phantom limb. We applied this VR system to 4 PLP patients in two different tactile conditions for 5 minutes respectively. The following findings were obtained: 1) PLP improved immediately after the VR training; and 2) Affective pain characteristics ameliorated greater than sensory pain characteristics; and finally 3) Tactile feedbacks on the healthy limb had inverse effects for the acquisition of voluntary movements of the phantom limb. These preliminary results show that we have achieved a milestone toward the neurorehabilitation platform system for PLP.