The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an intelligent immersive virtual reality platform for remote physical therapy and monitoring. The project's core technology examines biomechanical analysis to facilitate telemedicine both in the clinic and at the patient's home using a head-mounted display and hand trackers. This provides a means for in-patient success metrics and full-body virtual guidance using a remote virtual platform. Such technology may have the ability to enable greater affordability, accessibility, and accuracy of physical therapy for patients and therapists alike. Patient throughput potentially could be doubled through remote visits in virtual environments and automated physical health documentation. In addition, it is possible to target marginalized communities in "medical deserts," where patient care is significantly limited by hospital capacity, physical distance, doctors per population, and cost. With remote tools and predictive physical therapy analytics, more individuals will receive access to treatment regardless of socio-economic and demographic background. This technology could lower hospital visits, enable therapy clinics to remain open during shelter-in-place periods, decrease cost for patients and clinics alike, and begin detecting exercise needs earlier to manage the pace of recovery by each user.
This I-Corps project is based on the development of an immersive virtual reality environment for gamified rehabilitation. The experience provides a remote medium to monitor user pain, discomfort, mobility, and biometrics during a prescribed exercise session. Pilot research has developed the integration of artificial intelligence algorithms towards predictive runtime analytics for exercise in immersive virtual reality, as well as incorporating biofeedback (brainwave, heart rate, galvanic skin response) and soft wearable robotics (force assistive cable-driven suits) for evaluating virtual exercise games. In addition, research was performed with local healthcare organizations in Santa Cruz, California, to assess this technology towards providing patient success metrics and exercise interaction through commercial head-mounted display virtual reality (VR) systems. This technology has the potential to positively change a consumer's physical therapy experience by significantly reducing traditional clinical and insurance costs, enabling remote access for populations of low-socioeconomic backgrounds, alleviating discomfort for patients, and increasing remote recovery insights tenfold.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
