Leap Motion Based Exercises in Upper Extremity Rehabilitation of The Children
Condition: Rehabilitation; Physical Therapy
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), Cerebral Palsy (CP), and Obstetric Brachial Plexus
      Injury (OBPI) are the most common disorders that cause upper extremity impairments in
      children. Depending on the underlying pathologies, the common symptoms of these disorders are
      the limitations of the upper extremity joint movement angles, muscle imbalance and the
      functional limitations caused by the contracture due to these problems. Daily life activities
      such as feeding, personal care, and self mobility activities that use upper extremity are
      commonly limited with these children. Physical rehabilitation is mostly used to address these
      problems. However, the process of rehabilitation is difficult and lengthy. In addition, most
      of the time, classical rehabilitation is discouraging for many young patients. Employment of
      digital technology has been gaining momentum in addressing the above rehabilitation problems
      among the medical professionals.

      By utilizing exciting new sensor technologies, such as Microsoft Kinect, Nintendo Wii and
      Leap Motion, practical game based rehabilitation applications have been becoming popular.
      Video Based Games (VBG) that adopt the these technologies as Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
      interfaces are recently used successfully for the task of rehabilitation. The Leap Motion
      device, one of the new examples of these technologies, has a very small form factor. It
      includes two near infrared stereoscopic cameras to capture hand images of patients to produce
      3 Dimensional (3D) positions of hand joints at a very fast rate with a sufficient positional
      precision.

      There have been examples that use motion sensor based VBG's for the rehabilitation of
      different types of patient groups. Compared to classical rehabilitation practices, these
      applications provide many advantages such as ease of use, repeatableness, and instantaneous
      measurable feedback. In addition, the young patients involved in these applications
      demonstrated willingness to participate in these activities and they showed considerable
      progress in upper extremity rehabilitation. However, these VBG's were mostly developed for
      general public and it was often suggested to develop VBG's for the specific task of upper
      extremity rehabilitation of children. It is known that upper extremity specific VBG's and
      their applications are very limited both at the global and domestic levels.

      With this project, we plan to design and develop specialized Leap Motion based VBG's for the
      children diagnosed with JIA, CP, and OBPI. These VBG's will be designed to be easy to use and
      motivating for the children. They will automatically lead the patients to correct hand
      exercises and they will provide mechanisms for online performance measurements of the
      patients. The performance results from the patients will be compared with the results from
      the classical rehabilitation applications by the standards of The International
      Classification of Functioning (ICF). These games will provide complete Turkish language
      support for the extended national dissemination of the project outputs.

      The proposed project is inherently a multi disciplinary work that requires very close
      interaction of phisiotherapists, software experts, and HCI specialists and efficient
      application of the these games for the patients. There will be specialized games for each
      disorder. These games will utilize the outputs from the Leap Motion device that will produce
      3D hand joint positions and joint angles. Realistic animations of hand and virtual
      environments will provide a motivating exercise game platform for the patients.The
      performance measurements of the patients will be repeated for each game session. There will
      be game parameters for the game duration, difficulty level, and hand joints in focus. The
      game hand movements will reflect daily life activities for the rehabilitation purposes which
      would make our games different from the general public games. The project findings at end of
      the project on best game usage frequency and durations, the effectiveness of the designed
      VBG's and other results will be shared with the scientific community through publications and
      seminars.
    


Intervention name(s): Leap Motion Based Exercises
Intervention type(s): Device
Intervention description(s): Game based exercise
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Participant)
Primary purpose: Treatment
Keywords: Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis; Cerebral Palsy; Obstetric Brachial Plexus Palsy; Human Computer Interaction; Leap Motion; Video Game Based Rehabilitation