Virtual activities for grasp trainingStevanović, Isidora (Avtor) Podobnik, Janez (Mentor) Munih, Marko (Komentor) virtual realityhand movementmeasurementpinchgraspneurorehabilitationWith the constant development of technology, innovative and effective solutions are being introduced into the medical industry. Virtual reality is one example of how technology can be utilized in different spheres of medicine to help patients with various conditions. This thesis describes the system developed with the intention of one day being used during the process of hand neurorehabilitation of patients who have suffered from a stroke or a spinal cord injury. Traditional rehabilitation can be a tedious process, since it requires numerous repetitions of certain hand movements. Patients can rarely keep the concentration levels and motivation for the whole duration of the rehabilitation, decreasing the efficiancy and increasing the time needed for full recovery. Most of the patients do not even get to the end of the rehabilitation process, which results in many of them being left with the consequences that could easily be taken care of with an appropriate rehabilitation process. The proposed system utilizes the advantages of virtual reality with a goal to increase the patients’ efficiancy, motivation and enjoyment levels and provide an affordable system that can be used in patients’ homes as well as in the hospitals and rehabilitation centers. The research process included two bigger parts – the design of a 3D hand model as the first part, and the game programming, with the designed 3D hand as a vital part of the game, as the second part. The first part of the thesis describes the process of designing the hand model, the look of the virtual environment with the complementary gamification elements, as well as the configuration of hand movement in the game engine, while taking into consideration all the constraints of the real human hand. The goal was to program a hand movement that would be as similar as possible to the movement of the real hand. The process of real time hand control is described in the following chapters, with the detailed description of the mechanism needed for achieving the real time control of the hand model, using only one camera and some angle calculations. The system validation process is described in the final part of the thesis. Eight healthy test subjects participated in the experiments and their data has been analyzed afterward. The conclusion based on the analysis is presented in the thesis. Some of the parameters that have been monitored and analyzed are: subjects’ hand movement trajectories; reliability of joint angles detection; successful identification of certain hand movements, such as two-finger pinch and power grasp; and the influence of different wrist orientations and different environmental conditions on the final results of the experiment. Different age and gender groups participated in the study, contributing to the variety of results and better understanding of different groups’ needs and abilities, which gave us valuable insights for the project continuation. Subjects were also asked to provide feedback information related to the performed experiment and 100% of the tested subjects stated that their enjoyment levels during the performed experiment were very high, while the simplicity of the experiment itself is low to medium. The simplicity of the virtual reality game makes it suitable for older patients and patients who have also had some brain damage in addition to the physical paralysis, while the concept of playing a game can help them keep the motivation levels high, which ultimately contributes to better engagement, better efficiency, and therefore possibly shorter and more effective rehabilitation process.20232023-09-04 11:40:00Magistrsko delo/naloga149133VisID: 62398COBISS_ID: 165430019sl