A Cross-Platform Guidance System for Virtual Reality-Based Upper Limb Rehabilitation

The development of virtual reality (VR)-based rehabilitation offers new healthcare programme to patients with upper limb motor deficits. VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) provide patients with not only enhanced engagement and motivation, but better therapeutic performance. In the immersive environment, therapists that are important to rehabilitation sometimes provide guidance to patients as avatars in the game scene. To enhance the guidance efficiency and reduce the cost, this study aims to introduce a new cross-platform rehabilitation system, with patients taking rehabilitation through VR platform and therapists offer guidance through personal computer (PC) platform. The system involves visual and tactile guidance modalities as aids and extensions. To evaluate the cross-platform system, user experience and performance, two essential factors in a digital rehabilitation system are taken into consideration for the experiment. Subjective and objective data are collected during the experiment for healthy participants. Based on experience and performance analysis, this study generally achieved good user feedback and summarized the optimal guidance methods for cross-platform rehabilitation. Finally, this study contributes to the existing literature by proposing suggestions on the design considerations of cross-platform rehabilitation system, especially for the guidance included.