Summary

Funded by: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
From: 30/12/2016 until: 20/09/2020
Main Researchers: González, Pascual and Navarro, Elena

Webpage Vi-SMARt (Spanish)

Abstract

Our society is more and more aware of the need of taking actions that help the most vulnerable ones, and for this aim the use of ICT applications and solutions is crucial. A sample is the call this project apply for: Economy and the Digital society and Health, demographic change and well-being. In this context, one of the groups that claim for more attention is that of persons who, due to an accident or a degenerative process, require a rehabilitation process to recover physical, cognitive or even social abilities. Because of both the duration
and the frequency of such rehabilitation process, the need to do the rehabilitation partly outside of the rehabilitation centres has emerged. This has led to the development of ICT solutions for tele-rehabilitation.
The development of these ICT solutions involve several technological challenges. First, there is a need to adapt the rehabilitation to each patient as the diversity and severity of the damages cause a great variability with regard to disabilities. This variability demands a rehabilitation process that exploits different sensorial stimuli adapted to each patients needs. Second, one of the main advantages of these systems, that is, the reduction of assistance in the rehabilitation centres, and thus, the cutting down of the cost of treatments, may result into undesirable consequences. There are studies that warn against some of the consequences of tele-rehabilitation, such as social isolation or lack of motivation when people have to carry out complex exercises.
Another challenge, especially meaningful, is not just evaluating the usability or functionality, but determining the Technology Acceptance,that is, whether specialists and patients accept and are willing to apply successfully such systems. Otherwise, they will end in a failure. Last but not least, both technological advances and environments where rehabilitation takes place make the evolution a compelling need for these systems. For this reason, a proper design of their software architecture becomes a must to facilitate such evolution.
Taking into account the aforementioned challenges, this project has been defined. Thus, it will be studied how the use of Post-WIMP technologies, by means of multi-sensory activation, help in the patients rehabilitation. Similarly, it will be studied how the exploitation of haptic and vestibular (by means of walk in place platforms) stimuli impacts in both the development of tele-rehabilitation systems and the design of rehabilitation tasks designed by specialists. Moreover, it will be proposed to turn such systems into Collaborative Virtual
Environments (CVE) that enable patients to interact with their peers and specialists, improving the feeling of presence both individual and social, and to determine its effects on their isolation and motivation. Moreover, evaluations of Acceptance Technology will be carried that will allow other researchers and companies from the health sector to know whether such technologies have potential to be used in future research and developments. Finally, an architecture will be specified to enable the integration of the Post-WIMP technologies evaluated in
the project in order to develop Virtual, Social, Multi-sensori and Adaptive environments for the Rehabilitation (Vi-SMARt).