The Virtual Mall: A Functional Virtual Environment for Stroke Rehabilitation

Patients who have had a stroke constitute a large population with significant needs for rehabilitation. Even after long, intensive and costly rehabilitation, these patients still suffer from many impairments leading to severe restrictions in participation in every day life. This is a result of limited functional recovery of the upper extremity in addition to cognitive and meta-cognitive deficits. It is also due to insufficient training of IADL functioning during rehabilitation, primarily since such training is both time consuming and technically difficult to implement. The use of VR for rehabilitation of individuals with neurological impairments appears to be promising and its feasibility and effectiveness have been demonstrated in a number of different studies. However, the VR based interventions that have been developed and reported in the literature used mainly desktop platforms, and the majority of them did not include the stroke population. The aim of this paper is to present the development of a virtual environment using a video capture VR system, which provides an opportunity to carry out therapeutic intervention in a functional, natural and a motivating way. The results of a pilot study on patients with stroke highlighted its many potential advantages. These results as well as future directions will be discussed.