Enhancing Virtual Rehabilitation in Upper Limbs With Biocybernetic Adaptation: The Effects of Virtual Reality on Perceived Muscle Fatigue, Game Performance and User Experience.

Virtual rehabilitation has been used during decades to provide a more personalized, controlled, and enjoyable experience on upper-limb motor rehabilitation. Since novel virtual reality (VR) technologies are now accessible and highly immersive, the challenge for a wide dissemination of virtual rehabilitation in clinical scenarios has shifted from the hardware robustness to the software intelligence. A sophisticated technique that provides physiological intelligence to novel human-computer interaction (HCI) applications is biocybernetic adaptation.

Low cost implementation of a Motor Imagery experiment with BCI system and its use in neurorehabilitation.

The application of rehabilitation programs based on videogames with brain-computer interfaces (BCI) allows to provide feedback to the user with the expectation of stimulate the brain plasticity that will restore the motor control. The use of specific mental strategies such as Motor Imagery (MI) in neuroscientific experiments with BCI systems often requires the acquisition of sophisticated interfaces and specialized software for execution, which usually have a high implementation costs. We present a combination of low-cost hardware and open-source software for the implementation of videogame based on virtual reality with MI and its potential use as neurotherapy for stroke patients.