Characterization of engagement changes during VR based rehabilitation: A preliminary study

抄録

Cerebral Palsy refers to abnormal development or damage to areas of the brain responsible for various motor functions. This occurs most often during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly thereafter. Physiotherapy with high motivation is considered beneficial for patients. We have developed a VR game and physiotherapy system that is designed to intrinsically motivate and engage patients. The system provides physiotherapy with upper body movement coupled with hand and eye coordination. The game system is developed to document and monitor physiological data and performance in participating test subjects in order to provide post play session analysis. This analysis is then used to measure patient performance and to adjust and improve the game system further. It is our view that an engaging system will increase intrinsic motivation in patients and thus potentially provide increased hours of play and physiotherapy. In the current stage of development, we hypothesized that by increasing in-game variables such as the velocity, direction and frequency of moving target objects during the session, which test subjects would demonstrate increased oculomotor changes correspondingly. The results indicated that oculomotor levels do vary in relation to task levels, but this data is not sufficient to explain the level of test subject’s engagement. Additional work will be done measuring other biological data in relation to the in-game challenges.