Virtual rehabilitation

Virtual rehabilitation is the patient's training based entirely on, or augmented by virtual reality simulation exercises. If there is no conventional therapy provided, the rehabilitation is said to be "virtual reality-based." Otherwise, if virtual rehabilitation is in addition to conventional therapy, the intervention is "virtual reality-augmented." The term Virtual Rehabilitation was coined in 2002 by Professor Daniel Thalmann of EPFL (Switzerland) and Professor Grigore Burdea of Rutgers University (USA). In their view the term applies to both physical therapy and cognitive interventions (such as for patients suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, phobias, attention deficits or amnesia).

Virtual rehabilitation offers a number of advantages compared to conventional therapeutic methods:

• It is entertaining, thus motivating the patient;
• It provides objective outcome measures of therapy efficacy (limb velocity, range of movement, error rates, game scores, etc.);
• These data are transparently stored by the computer running the simulation and can be made available on the Internet.
• Thus virtual rehabilitation can be performed in the patient's home and monitored at a distance (becoming telerehabilitation)