In 2020, Åsa Egnér started VirtualRehab ART4Health AB to make VR for artistic and rehabilitative purposes. The company identifiy itself as Social entrepreneurship which develop, and implement solutions to social, cultural, and environmental issues. In June 2020, the company received support from Vinnova. Over the past year, we have created a product with a number of variations of rehab training, for instance in a redwood forest and a seascape environment, based on prototypes from a previous project.
VR-app Virtual Rehab.
Purpose and goal
The purpose is to stimulate patients with virtual reality, distract from pain and create calming experiences that arouse wonder in artistically constructed virtual paintings. In this VR app, you interactively practice yoga, physiotherapy, and 3D orientation, with a personal motion capture trainer.
The goal of VirtualRehab is to build scalable products in the VR app for different rehab groups, and to test interactions and artistic virtual design in collaboration and conversation with patient associations.
Expected effects and results
The target group is people in need of movement, cognitive stimuli, and pain relief. The benefit will be a cheaper solution for healthcare. Physiotherapists or yoga teachers show exercises inside VR, via an animated personal motion capture trainer. If necessary, a physically present yoga teacher or physiotherapist can first introduce the exercises, so that they are performed correctly. The app is based on the issue that ”training does not take place”, and instead uses the gaming industry’s approach to trigger the brain’s reward centers with progress and interactions to get people to return to training. The app has different settings and difficulty levels, so the training can suit different users.
The prototypes have been developed together with professional yoga teachers and physiotherapists as well as programmers, doctors, unity developers and modelers, musicians and sound designers from Sweden, Denmark and Poland. We also used the motion capture lab at Lund University for recording, and business developers from Innovation Skåne.
A child who is restricted to a hospital bed for a long time who still needs a fun and stimulating activity. A person who should start training their mobility again. An injured person who needs to exercise daily but the pain does not go away. A person who needs distractions from pain or stress and instead experience peace and quiet. These are some examples of people we think can appreciate VirtualRehabART4Health.
The person walks around in a beautiful, harmonious sea environment, they move in a way so that dewdrops are created that water the soil and make flowers grow.
