PhysiCube

Abstract

Persons with a neurological disorder are confronted with significantly reduced physical abilities during their daily activities. Physiotherapy, for these patients mainly provided in rehabilitation centres, utilizes tangible, real-world objects in training for the upper limbs. Only by intensely and frequently exercising, patients have a chance to sustain or enhance their functional performance. Our research explores pervasive technologies and tangible objects to provide motivating, technology-supported training systems in a residential environment for independent use by these patients. In this paper, we describe our pervasive training system 'PhysiCube', consisting of prototypes 'LiftACube' and 'ReachACube'. PhysiCube takes advantage of tangible interactions and games to provide motivating physical training for the upper limbs. An evaluation with therapists showed great appreciation for our prototypes. Reflections on the technical setup and use of tangible interaction for these pervasive rehabilitation systems in a residential setting are elaborated upon.

The use of Matti: a tangible user interface in physical rehabilitation to motivate children and older adults

“…There have been a number of rehabilitation systems developed based on TUI approach since it is considered to be more intuitive and accessible for patients with a low level of technology experience. For example, a TUI built to be used for written and spoken comprehension therapy in aphasic patients (Rybarczyk and Fonseca, 2011), tabletops used in neural rehabilitation (Leitner et al, 2007) and motor rehabilitation (Annett et al, 2009), and a pervasive training system providing tangible interactions in physical rehabilitation for the upper limbs (Vandermaesen et al, 2014). In these studies, TUI was mainly chosen as the technology to support rehabilitation because of the advantage of the manipulation of physical objects that is considered to ensure an effective transfer of therapy exercises into everyday life activities.…”

Using Both Hands

“…However, the majority of the work for supporting stroke rehabilitation with interactive devices has focused on designing one-handed interaction (e.g. [2,5,13,51,54]) and bimanual interaction has not been the primary design principle. For example, in a study by Balaam et al [5], whilst the therapist recommended a stroke survivor to do the rehabilitation activity two-handed, the stroke survivor used only one of her upper limbs to perform the movements.…”

“…Most of the studies on tangible stroke rehabilitation devices designed for home environments have used fixed size objects, and the impact of form factor has not been discussed [6,27,38,44]. A few studies have acknowledged the importance of the form factor of the hand-held object and have allowed stroke survivors to choose their preferred size [12,51,52] or the tangible object itself [21], but no further insight of the impact of the sizes and the materials has been given. Overall, it is unclear how tangibles for home environments should be designed and what properties should be tailored.…”

“…To achieve this, we customised ActivSticks (see Figure 1a), a dedicated bimanual rehabilitation device resulting from a user-centred design process involving stroke survivors and rehabilitation professionals [25]. Although recent work indicates that bimanual rehabilitation is potentially more effective than one-handed training [28] and bimanual interaction guarantees the use of impaired hand, existing work on interactive stroke rehabilitation has mainly focused on one-handed interaction (e.g., [2,5,13,19,51,54]). Moreover, commercial game controllers have been mainly used in previous studies (e.g., [3,13,16,54]) limiting the range of possible movements, such as squeezing.…”

Exploring the Potential of Physical Visualizations

“…Most articles in this category only had a short mention of digital fabrication and the actual contribution and topic had a different focus. Examples are 3D-printed phone cases (e.g., Park et al [2015]) or game controllers (e.g., Lin et al [2014]; Varesano [2013]) as well as laser cut physical components (e.g., Vandermaesen et al [2013]; ).…”