Interactive virtual reality game-based rehabilitation for cerebral palsy children using kinect

Abstract

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a disorder that impairs a person's ability to control their muscles due to damage to the growing brain. Rehabilitation may help reduce issues such as joint contractures and enhance limb range of motion and coordination if begun at a young age. Despite its well-established effectiveness, traditional motor training for children with cerebral palsy encounters several administrative challenges, such as a lack of therapists, lengthy waiting periods, geographic isolation, and difficulty in progress tracking. Furthermore, repeated forms of treatment for children with cerebral palsy without any active engagement from the children may make the therapy less successful owing to boredom experienced by the CP children. The objective of this research is to provide an interactive game-based virtual reality therapy for children with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) to promote upper limb development in CP children. In this research, a relationship was formed with the Persatuan Cerebral Palsy Johor therapist committee to oversee the research. The therapist assisted in the selection of appropriate children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) and the age of 7 to 12 years old were chosen as the age of research. As for reference, a similar age group of children were chosen to provide understanding between the cerebral palsy children and a normal children. The children’s both undergone similar one hour of VR rehabilitation to further understand the effect of the VR rehabilitation on their muscle’s signals and their x, and z axis acceleration and angular velocity movement by attaching a surface electromyography and inertial momentum unit on their wrist. The result from the research shows that the game by VR rehabilitation for the cerebral palsy was able provide quantitively show data from the acceleration, angular velocity, and the muscle signals from the surface electromyography sensor. From this research, it shows that while using rehabilitation through virtual reality game, the muscles signals amplitude from the children suffering from upper body spastic was higher as compared to the normal children and the result from the two-sample t-test (Mean = 679.009, SD = 516.595, n = 1035) was lower than the normal children's movement (Mean = 684.578, SD=1.596, n =1035). This shows that the children undergoing the virtual rehabilitation has potential of improving their muscles signals through long terms effort while rehabilitating through VR. As for locomotion, the descriptive analysis shows the t one tail test shows that the greatest difference in the z-axis acceleration while the motion for the other x and y axis has a p value less than z-axis. This shows that the CP and normal children shares similar features acceleration at x and y axis and angular velocity similar for x, y and z axis, which shows that through long term rehabilitation, the locomotion movement may help to improve their movement similar with a normal children.