Affective States and Virtual Reality to Improve Gait Rehabilitation: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Over seven million people suffer from an impairment in Mexico; 64.1% are gait-related, and 36.2% are children aged 0 to 14 years. Furthermore, many suffer from neurological disorders, which limits their verbal skills to provide accurate feedback. Robot-assisted gait therapy has shown significant benefits, but the users must make an active effort to accomplish muscular memory, which usually is only around 30% of the time. Moreover, during therapy, the patients’ affective state is mostly unsatisfied, wide-awake, and powerless. This paper proposes a method for increasing the efficiency by combining affective data from an Emotiv Insight, an Oculus Go headset displaying an immersive interaction, and a feedback system. Our preliminary study had eight patients during therapy and eight students analyzing the footage using the self-assessment Manikin. It showed that it is possible to use an EEG headset and identify the affective state with a weighted average precision of 97.5%, recall of 87.9%, and F1-score of 92.3% in general. Furthermore, using a VR device could boost efficiency by 16% more. In conclusion, this method allows providing feedback to the therapist in real-time even if the patient is non-verbal and has a limited amount of facial and body expressions.

Enhanced Rehabilitation Outcomes of Robotic-Assisted Gait Training with EksoNR Lower Extremity Exoskeleton in 19 Stroke Patients

“…Effective methods supporting the standard neuro-rehabilitation process in gait and mobility disorders in patients after stroke, based on the use of virtual reality, biofeedback, or assistive robotic devices, have been sought for several years [ 16 , 17 ]. The benefits of using robotic-assisted gait training (RAGT) in the re-education of gait in stroke patients have been described in many previous publications.…”