VR Walk

13. feb.

Motivating Gait Rehabilitation training through VR game.

Background

Often in their rehabilitation process neurological patients need to work on re-establishing their gait and walking skills. In this work there are a lot of different exercises they do together with a physiotherapist. Motivation is key in order to have the best chance of succeeding. In addition, it is important that the skills obtained can be applied in the real, and more chaotic world, where there are sounds, traffic, other pedestrians etc., that can take focus and break the concentration. To help mitigate these issues a VR game has been built that can help keep up motivation through gamification, and that also includes cognitive tasks, in other to prepare patients for the real world outside of the rehabilitation room. The game was developed by Lars Peder Vatshelle Bovim together with Lauritz Valved and Bendik Bleikli when they all were students. Since then, the game has been developed and enhanced in several iterations.

Advantages

In the game the therapist can set up different routes with different tasks and difficulty levels according to the needs of the patients. One can therefore find tasks that fit with the patients interests and needs and can increase difficulty as the master different tasks. After each finished game a score is calculated enabling an easy way of tracking progress. The combination of walking tasks and cognitive tasks are a vital step that distinguish it from other exercises and measures.

Technology description

VR Walk is made and designed in Unity. It contains 10 different tasks, and 3 pre-set difficult levels, with the option of defining your own difficult setting. Each task accumulates points that are then shown in the end. Task are for instance, breaking objects with an axe, remembering a sequence while walking, or balancing a burning ball on a plate while walking.

Business opportunity

We are interested in talking to companies that could sell game to potential customers, e.g. rehabilitation centers, hospitals, physioteraptists.

Protection
Source code is kept secret

Inventors

Lars Peder Vatshelle Bovim, Høgskolen på Vestlandet

Lauritz Valved

Bendik Bleikli

Contact

If you wish to discuss the project or have any questions, please contact:

Steffen Boga

Senior Business Developer

sbo@visinnovasjon.no