Automate virtual reality rehabilitation evaluation for chronic imbalance and vestibular dysfunction patients

Dizziness is a major consequence of chronic imbalance and vestibular dysfunction, which prevents people performing their routine tasks and affects their quality of life. It may lead to severe injuries caused by unexpected falling. Medicine treatment can alleviate the syndrome of dizziness and past research shows that dizziness can be further reduced if appropriate vestibular function rehabilitation exercises are practiced regularly. Nevertheless, these exercises are usually time-consuming and tedious because of repetitive motions. Most of patients ceases practicing accordingly and reduce the effectiveness of rehabilitation. In order to encourage patients to be involved in the rehabilitation process, interactive rehabilitative gaming systems are introduced in the recent research. Virtual reality technology is used to enhance the gaming experiences and vision sensors are served as gaming inputs. This paper proposes a series of novel virtual reality games adapted by Cawthorne-Cooksey exercises, which are extensively used in clinical for chronic imbalance and vestibular dysfunction rehabilitation. 32 patients participate in the rehabilitation processes within two months period and their gaming parameters and quantified balance indices are analyzed by the supported vector machine (SVM) classifier. It shows that ∼81 % patients improve their game parameters and balance indices after undertaking the dizziness rehabilitation training compared to the measurement they had. Our clinical observations also reveal that our patients have higher willing and motivation to regularly perform rehabilitation with the proposed system.