Hand tele-rehabilitation in haptic virtual environment

Rehabilitation is a critical recovery part for many stroke survivors. Intensive and continuing rehabilitation helps patients recover functional skills and return to independent livings. To supplement the traditional rehabilitation and alleviate the needs of therapists, an innovative self-trained rehabilitation system is essential. This paper introduces a tele-rehabilitation system developed with haptic virtual environment technologies. The system is designed as ice hockey game formats which can attract users to repetitively implement their training sessions. Tele-operation implemented in the system allows a therapist to watch the user´s recovery process and adjust the treatment from a remote location, while users remain in their home settings or health care centers. The practicing data is analyzed and the result is shown to both therapist and user. The data is saved in files for the future analysis.