Virtual Reality Physiotherapy

Physiotherapy is steadily gaining grounds as an indispensable part of any rehabilitation procedure. The awareness and importance of Physiotherapy is well understood by millennials. Our modern lifestyle causes a lot of people to experience injuries due to accidents, impact sports traumas, sitting in front of a computer for long periods or hunching over smartphones.

One promising technology called  Virtual Reality Physiotherapy (VRP) is being employed due to its effectiveness. The adoption is also expected to grow multifold within the coming few years.

Virtual Reality Physiotherapy is a simulation in healthcare which uses gamification solutions to help reduce patient hospital stays and provides a non-intrusive alternative to surgery.

Traditionally physiotherapy requires repetitive verbal and tactile instructions administered by the healthcare professional to the patients. They can sometimes be painful or monotonous and therefore patients resent them. Its also difficult to collect data in an automated fashion for later analysis.

In order to keep the therapy entertaining, engaging and effective for both patients and healthcare professionals alike, more clinicians are turning towards healthcare simulations assisted by serious game technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and gamification. This provides a more immersive experience for the patients and this in-turn results in patient willingly wanting to engage with the physical therapy exercises thereby enabling speedy recovery. 

Because the therapy is assisted by serious gaming technologies, meaningful data collection and subsequent analysis is possible to improve the system as a whole or to customise the system to suit the individual needs of a particular patient.

MAGES Studio, a Singapore based Serious Game Development and Gamification Studio worked on an app called Fly Home. The app requires the user to perform certain gestures in order to guide a bird to her home. On the way the user can collect pickups. This causes the user to perform specific gestures aided by the simulation which in-turn aids in the rehabilitation process.