LOWER LIMB PHYSICAL THERAPY MADE MORE PLEASANT BY SIMULATING A BIKE RIDE AT HOME WITH A PERCRO LABORATORY VIRTUAL CYCLE ERGOMETER
Lower limb rehabilitation becomes more pleasant thanks to virtual reality. Today, it is possible to move immersed in natural, relaxing scenery or in a Tuscan village, even without leaving home, while riding a stationary bike on which a virtual cycle ergometer has been applied. This device measures several parameters, such as pedal stroke intensity and physical effort, in order to perform lower limb rehabilitation exercises. Thanks to the visualisation of the bike ride in virtual reality, rehabilitation exercises become a pleasant experience, less repetitive and therefore more effective.
This new technological device has been developed by the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (PERCRO) of the TeCIP Institute (Institute of Communication, Information and Perception Technologies) and was presented in preview at the event Tuttocasa 2016, in Carrara. During the CarrozzAbile event, the researchers of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies set up a demonstration to show the functionalities and opportunities of the technological device. The Sant’Anna group was involved in an awareness campaign on architectural barriers and disabilities, in collaboration with the Associazione Italiana per l'assistenza agli spastici (AIAS Onlus) of Carrara, which uses the device daily and obtains great success among patients.
In detail, the team of the laboratory, composed by the assistant professor Marcello Carrozzino, the research fellow Raffaello Brondi, the PhD student Alessandro Graziano and the technician Alessandro Nicoletti, has built a virtual cycle ergometer, in order to make more enjoyable the rehabilitation exercises that the disabled people from the Institute, managed by the association AIAS Onlus, are required to perform on a daily basis.
The device is composed of: a commercial cycle ergometer, to which sensors are applied to measure the patient pedal stroke frequency; a monitor, on which are displayed virtual landscapes considered ideal for bike rides. The virtual landscape is updated in real time using the information taken by the sensors on the cycle ergometer, in such a way as to simulate the movement the cyclist would experience if pedalling outside. The patient has the perception of experiencing a bike ride through various landscapes. The researchers travelled by bike through a few stretches of the town of Carrara, capturing them with a camera fixed to the bicycle frame in order to create sceneries to show to the patients during their rehabilitation sessions.
“Having to take several 30-minute sessions a day, it was important to make the rehabilitation session more interesting: the first step of the project was to simulate a bike ride, offering visual stimulation coherent with the physical activity. The real sceneries from the town of Carrara, where most of the people frequenting this centre come from, made this experience less synthetic, allowing them to take a bike ride around a town they usually live from the perspective of a wheelchair”
“In the future, the objective is to allow two or more people, even in distance, to share the experience and to be able to see one another in the virtual reality. In this way, the experience would be enriched by the playful metaphor a bike competition, pushing the users to improve their performance”.
