Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Technologies for Smart Physical Rehabilitation

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies provides new experiences to the users during physical rehabilitation training sessions increasing the engagement for improved physical outcomes. These relatively new technologies are the starting point on the development of new services that can be defined as “Physical Therapy at Home” or “Remote Physical Therapy”. The VR and AR serious game can be considered complementary of the regular training in clinics, where mechanical equipment is commonly used. By comparison with classical technology for training the new VR and AR based solutions that are part of IoT Physical Rehabilitation ecosystem assure data storage for individual exercises performed by the users. Data analysis is commonly implemented in this kind of architecture, the obtained results can be used by physiotherapist to perform and objective evaluation of patient physical outcome and to tailor the training plans. The user interaction with virtual scenarios or virtual objects in real scenario imply the usage of human computer interfaces characterized by different degree of unobtrusively. Thus, wearable, environment embedded or remote sensing solutions together different type of IoT physical rehabilitation architectures are considered in this chapter. Different AR and VR scenarios were implemented using Unity game development software for different computation platform. Different types of interfaces based on new technologies that assure the user interaction with AR or VR rehabilitation environment are considered including wearable smart sensors, environment embedded sensors, mobile device and big displays.