A patient with balance problems stands on a bosu ball while hitting a playful puffer fish between two agile penguins.
Another is seated and holds a heavy ball while kicking the pinball controls with his feet.
standing on one foot while walking on a footpath on the beach; making a ham and cheese sandwich in a food cart; Play tarot cards.
These may all seem like strange ways to undergo physical therapy – but this is the future of rehabilitation, enabled by virtual reality (VR) tools.
Nora Foster, Physician, Physiotherapist and Executive Director of NorthBound Health. “The immersive virtual reality experience motivates and challenges patients to get the most out of their rehabilitation treatment.”
Medical device company Penumbra hopes to further enable this capability — and help improve patient outcomes — with today’s launch of its first hands-free, full-body, unconstrained VR rehabilitation platform.
Penumbra’s REAL System Y-Series is the only platform using upper and lower body sensors that allows clinicians to track whole body movement and progress in real time, we show penumbra Chief Executive Officer Adam Al-Sisar.
“The full body was the next big step,” he said, “It’s the only thing in our area that people want so they can work with patients in the rest of the body, not just the upper part, the whole body. It opens the window to help many people.”
Penumbra REAL . system The y-series that take advantage of VR now feature improved hardware and sensor technology – particularly the lower body sensors. Consisting of a headset and five sensors, Elsesser said, it can now manipulate both the upper and lower extremities with a full-body avatar.
It is currently being used in clinics and hospitals across the United States for patients undergoing physical, occupational, and speech therapy, Elsesser explained. Helps address upper body weakness caused by stroke and other conditions, core and balance, cognition, functional uses, daily living training activities (grocery shopping, self care) and cognitive stimulation.
Elsesser said the REAL System y-Series is designed for use with a therapist who directs patients’ movements. They can project what the patient sees in virtual reality on a tablet. Clinicians can then customize exercises and activities to challenge, motivate, and engage patients, with movement and progress tracked in real time.
But Elsiser quickly emphasized that this “isn’t just a game we’re repurposing. It’s specifically geared towards healthcare. The experiments and activities that take place in virtual reality are designed by very serious clinicians.”
Also, while the metaverse is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics in tech – if not the free world – right now, he emphasized that the product is called the “real system” for a reason.
He said that people using avatars in the emerging metaverse to attend unique virtual events that aren’t possible in the real world, wear virtual clothes, buy virtual goods, and have experiences they’ll never have are all well and good — but in this case, the world is being used. Virtual to help people return to the real world.
“We don’t want people to live in a pseudo world,” Elsizer said. We are a healthcare company, we want people to get better and go back to their daily lives. This is just a particularly convenient tool for doing that.”
Overcoming rehabilitation challenges
The feeling is that the need for innovative rehabilitation treatment has never been greater. For example, in a YouGov survey of more than 100 physical therapists in the United States, 80% of respondents said the field had changed only moderately or not at all over the past decade.
Similarly, nearly 75% say patient compliance is the biggest challenge in physiotherapy today, and more than half believe that virtual reality can help improve this.
And while the majority of physical therapists (65%) are eager to use technologies like virtual reality in their practices, only 39% believe that decision makers in hospitals and clinics are more likely to invest in such technologies.
Foster et al agree that two of the biggest challenges to overcome in rehabilitation are keeping the patient motivated and not participating.
Foster said virtual reality can help with this in a number of ways. For example, patients in pain are often reluctant to move and challenge themselves. But, when this patient puts the VR system on, it moves in ways it hasn’t (or haven’t done in a long time) ever.
From a mental health perspective, meanwhile, a patient with a spinal cord injury or brain injury often can’t do physical things or go places — understandably frustrating. Virtual reality allows them to forget about these conditions for a while, Foster said.
“With access to this specialized equipment, I can engage and motivate my patients through fun and interesting activities,” said Foster, who has used the REAL System for a range of injuries and conditions.
She specifically referred to one patient who had difficulty with typical rehabilitation activities and eventually gave up treatment altogether. But when the therapists showed him REAL and the various activities, he “felt really engaged, which led to me getting involved in therapy again,” she said. In fact, “He just loves it.”
As patients age, El Sisser said, settings can be modified to keep them engaged. Therapists have data in a way that is difficult to measure and see when just watching someone.
He noted that using virtual reality increases therapists’ satisfaction as well. “They love watching their patients get more engaged.”
gaming roots
As Elsizer explains, he and Arani Boss founded Penumbra in 2004 initially with a focus on stroke patients. The company is best known for its interventional techniques for stroke-causing blood clots. “At the time, this was great technology,” Elsizer said.
The company has since moved on to technologies that treat conditions in other parts of the body, starting its path into virtual reality technologies just five years ago (and rather by accident). Elsesser said that in 2017, he was invited to demonstrate SixSense game technology.
He said he was reluctant at first, but went anyway, and described being in the midst of a game standing on top of the castle wall and thwarting the attackers. Suddenly, two other players shouted because of the noise of the game that he should close his eyes.
he did not do. “I wanted to see what I wasn’t supposed to see,” he said.
It turns out that a malfunction in the headset caused the floor of the VR castle to turn a bright white nothingness. As he explained, even though he intellectually knew it wasn’t real, he was experiencing a physical reaction.
The benefits of healthcare are becoming so obvious, he said, that he likened the ability of virtual reality to deceive people to neuroplasticity (when the brain rewires itself based on internal and external stimuli).
“It’s been an amazing journey getting here,” Elsesser said of today’s release. “We can’t wait to hear the individual stories patients will be able to share, telling us how they feel better, work better, and return to a more normal life.”
Originally posted 2022-11-15 09:37:14.