Authoring Tools for Procedural Modeling of Virtual Reality-Based Rehabilitation Exercises

Patient compliance is one of the key factors for rehabilitation programs to be effective. To increase patients’ engagement game technologies and virtual reality can be applied. However, the advantages provided by these techniques are not enough to be applied in real scenarios since experts do not always have the required technological skills. To overcome this limitation, a new virtual reality-based rehabilitation system that combines virtual reality, procedural modeling, and authoring tools, is proposed. The system provides easy-to-use editors for the experts to prepare rehabilitation exercises that will take place in an expanding and varied open virtual world created using procedural generation strategies. Patients using a virtual reality headset explore this immersive virtual scenario and solve challenges by applying actions according to their rehabilitation goals and receiving success/failure feedback. While the patient interacts with the exercises through immersive virtual reality, the expert supervises the patient’s actions via a computer monitor where the exercise is displayed at the same time as in the headset. The paper presents the system and the evaluation that has been carried out to set the system configuration parameters that allow non-experts the easy creation of varied open virtual worlds for rehabilitation purposes. In addition, it collects the first impressions of rehabilitators which have been very satisfactory.