Date of Award

August 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Engineering

First Advisor

Na Jin Seo

Committee Members

Naira Campbell Kyureghyan, Brooke A. Slavens

Keywords

House of Quality, Kinect, Rehabilitation, Stroke Survivors, Usability Evaluation, Virtual Reality

Abstract

Stroke is one of the primary causes of long-term disability in adults in the United States which leads to mild to severe sensorimotor impairments. Long-term continuous rehabilitation therapies are needed to facilitate sensorimotor recovery and empower patients in performing daily living activities. Currently, the opportunity of receiving post stroke rehabilitation in the chronic stage (> 6 months post stroke) is limited due to a lack of insurance and the high cost of therapy. Low-cost virtual rehabilitation games with motion tracking devices have tremendous potential to assist physical rehabilitation. Motion tracking devices such as Kinect (Microsoft, Redmond, CA; $100) and P5 Glove (Essential Reality, LLC, NY; $40) have become available to enable development of low-cost virtual rehabilitation games. Such low-cost games may encourage continuous, repeated, and intensive rehabilitation therapies thereby enhancing recovery post stroke. However, current virtual rehabilitation games emphasize on gross arm movements using Kinect or fine finger movements using P5 Glove, but not both at the same time. Since most daily living activities require coordination of the gross shoulder/elbow movement and fine finger movement such as reaching to grasp and transferring a jar to a shelf, effective upper limb rehabilitation must involve coordination of the arm and finger movements. In addition, many virtual rehabilitation games have been developed without user input and feedback, which may be the primary reason why virtual rehabilitation games are not prominently used at home by patients. This thesis presents the development and usability evaluation of low-cost virtual rehabilitation games. In addition to the archery and puzzle games previously developed in the laboratory, a low-cost rehabilitation kitchen game was developed to encourage patients to practice various functional tasks involving coordinated arm and finger movements that were detected by using Kinect and P5 Glove, respectively. Usability of the three games was assessed with ten chronic stroke survivors using pre-game and post-game surveys. The games met patients' expectations of providing challenging movements. The House of Quality analysis revealed that technical characteristic needing the most improvement was device reliability. The future research should address device reliability by developing a better instruction manual to facilitate device set-up and use. In addition, filtering data can also improve quality of virtual arm movements in future versions of the games. In summary, this thesis presents promising evidence for low-cost rehabilitation games using commercially available motion tracking devices of Kinect and P5 Glove together with free Blender software.

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