Game-based virtual rehabilitation system for upper extremity using low-cost camera

In health care, rehabilitation treatment provides interventions that go beyond medical therapy to help those with injuries and illness to re-establish themselves as productive and socially-integrated citizens. However, in developing countries, rehabilitation becomes a big challenge for the demands of rehabilitation from a great amount of patients with very limited medical services. Along with the development of technology, scholars in the rehabilitation field and medical care are trying to integrate Virtual Reality (VR) technology to perform cost reduction, home based activities, easy to deploy and maintain for patients. The paper aims at upper extremities rehabilitation for patients who lost their motor function caused by disconnection among their brain neurons or stroke. We propose a system using a low-cost camera to track movement of patient's hand and design game-based exercises to verify the functionality of the system on rehabilitation. Our experiment results have proved the effectiveness of this rehabilitation training task and also exploit topics related to VR technology.