Virtual Reality System for Biomechanical Assessment of Gross Motor Skills

Physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists often diagnose and evaluate the effects of a treatment using subjective methods, such as direct observation, self-reports or surveys. As a consequence, and in spite of the visual evidence of the positive treatment results, the benefits of many treatments are considered to be placebo effects. This, in turn, prevents healing methods or treatments from being disseminated due to the small amount or lack of supporting medical/scientific evidence. In the last years, significant advances in sensing and computing technologies have been achieved. Recently, a number of studies have demonstrated that contact and non-contact sensors, as well as real-time data processing systems, represent potential tools for monitoring and analysis of human body movements. However, their clinical implementation still faces many challenges due mainly to their unaffordable cost, their high-complexity that demands technical skills and training and their limited use in measuring kinematic parameters of body movement.

In this project, students, researchers and experienced clinical practitioners are working together to develop a system for the biomechanical assessment of human body that will overcome the previously identified limitations. Efforts will be concentrate on the development of a low cost and easy to learn and use system that enables clinicians to monitor continuously patients´ joint movements during the execution of virtual reality tasks and assess their gross motor skill in terms of biomechanical measurements and task performance.

Project Leader: Dra. Nadia Vanessa Garcia Hernandez

Email: nadia.hernandez@cinvestav.edu.mx    Tel. (844)438-96-00 Ext. 8513

ryma.cinvestav.mx/ngarcia

Skills

Posted on

18 December, 2017

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