Fly like an owl to train your neck

In this VR game, you control an owl with head movements: just tilt your head forward and the owl makes a nosedive. Meanwhile, you’re actually doing neck exercises. Elisabeth Wilhelm and her PhD-student Luís Felipe García Arias developed this game together with Marina de Koning-Tijssen, a neurologist at the University Medical Center Groningen. The game was developed for patients who experience abnormal movements and postures of the neck due to a neurological disorder called cervical dystonia.

There are about 8,000 patients with cervical dystonia in the Netherlands, De Koning-Tijssen reports. ‘Treatment for these patients mainly consists of regular botulinum toxin injections in the neck, although many patients also need physiotherapy for the rest of their lives. This VR game is meant to be an addition to those treatments and might partly replace the therapist.’

Wilhelm elaborates: ‘This game makes the exercises that people have to do at home more enjoyable. But more importantly, the user gets instant feedback.’ In the game you need to score points by flying through a series of hoops. ‘The score in the game immediately shows whether you’ve executed an exercise correctly.’

The biggest challenge for the researchers was to infer the exact movement of a user from the sensor data, Wilhelm explains. ‘A VR headset typically has a single sensor to determine in which direction a user is looking. But then you don’t know whether someone only turned their head or their whole upper body.’ In the lab, the researchers used sixteen extra sensors to measure this exactly.

For use in practice, PhD student García Arias managed to reduce this number to just one additional sensor. ‘Otherwise, this would become quite an expensive game to use in the daily care for patients!’ Wilhelm says. Right now, the game is not ready to be used outside the lab. Wilhelm expects that she will need another five years or so to develop the game further.

^{Text: FSE Science Newsroom | Charlotte Vlek
Photos: Reyer Boxem}