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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Contribution of virtual reality to functional rehabilitation

subject

description

Virtual reality has grown immensely. Practical applications for the use of this technology encompass many fields in both engineering science and human science. In the field of medicine, one of the newest fields to benefit from the advances in VR technology, virtual reality has become a major new therapeutic tool not only in medicine and surgery but also for the treatment of psychological disorders and rehabilitation for impaired person. Our research presented in this thesis aims at developing utilities to aid in functional rehabilitation using virtual reality technology. The main research question of our work concerns the effect of virtual metaphors in learning and training human gestures for motor rehabilitation. In fact, we have discussed and considered essential issues both in technological and scientific aspects. Indeed, three main issues have been addressed and studied in our work. The first issue concerns human gesture evaluation. We have developed a tool to assess the human motion to help the patient in gesture learning, thus this tool is able to indicate the evolution of patient during the procedure of motor rehabilitation. The second issue has a connection with the usability of a virtual environment for motor rehabilitation. We conducted our work to assess the role of the virtual avatar or virtual human, the most important factor in the kind of second-person and third-person view virtual environment for motor rehabilitation. Thus, significant result of our work allows to evaluate the usability of others virtual factors. The last issue we have addressed involves the improvement the ability to practice independently the virtual environment for motor rehabilitation. Indeed, we developed a tool allowing the patient to retrieve automatically human gesture for training. We have implemented protocols which have demonstrated the pertinence of our hypothesis.