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Objective To determine the clinical effectiveness of adding virtual reality via the Nintendo Wii console and its Wii Balance Board to physiotherapy treatment in patients with total hip arthroplasty. Design Randomized controlled trial. Setting Clinical Hospital San Borja Arriaran, Santiago, Chile. Participants A total of 73 patients over 50 years of age with total hip arthroplasty were randomly allocated to two groups. Interventions The control group (n = 37) received 6 weeks of physiotherapy treatment; the intervention group (n = 36) received the same treatment plus virtual reality exercises with the Nintendo Wii console. Outcome measures The two groups were assessed at baseline and after the 6 weeks of treatment. The primary outcome assessed was the function with the WOMAC questionnaire. The secondary outcomes were the Berg Balance Scale, distance covered with the six-minute walk test, and difference in weight load on the lower extremities. Results A total of 73 patients, 37 patients in the control group (20 women; mean age of 70.9 ± 9.16 years) and 36 patients in the intervention group (18 women; mean age of 70.39 ± 9.02 years) were analyzed. At the end of the treatment, the difference between groups for the total WOMAC score was −10.4 points ( p = 0.00), 4.7 points ( p = 0.00) for the Berg Balance Scale, and 45.2 mt ( p = 0.00) for the six-minute walk test All differences were in favor of the intervention group. Conclusions In the short term, the addition of virtual reality via the Nintendo Wii and its Wii Balance Board platform showed statistically significant differences in the function of patients with total hip replacement, but these differences were not minimally clinically important. Trial registration: This research was registered in the Clinical Trials Registry of Australia and New Zealand, with reference ACTRN12618001252202.

In this paper a study is conducted in order to evaluate three different strategies of haptic feedback for texture discrimination in virtual environments. Specifically, both force and vibrotactile feedback have been evaluated, as well as the direct use of the sense of touch, to detect different textures. To this end, a force feedback Phantom device, a custom built vibrotactile dataglove and paper palpable prototypes, which represent an ideal model of tactile feedback, have been compared. These three methods have been used to detect two types of patterns, one formed by different geometrical shapes, and the other with different grooves width. Results show that the vibrotactile dataglove has a notable behaviour in the detection of textures where the frequency of tactile stimuli varies, and it is even useful to detect more complex textures.