Feasibility and Usability of an Omnidirectional Treadmill–Based Virtual Reality Rehabilitation Game: A Mixed–Methods Feasibility Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IMPORTANCE: Virtual reality (VR) has been introduced to stroke rehabilitation along with omnidirectional (360°) treadmills to promote improvements in walking and balance. OBJECTIVE: The primary objective was to develop a rehabilitation omni-VR game and estimate the feasibility and usability of the game according to individuals with chronic stroke and physical therapists. The secondary objective was to generate preliminary walking characteristics and postural sway data among survivors of stroke. DESIGN: This was a mixed-methods feasibility study. SETTING: This study took place at a stroke research lab in Halifax, Canada. PARTICIPANTS: The participants were individuals with chronic stroke and stroke rehabilitation physical therapists. EXPOSURE: The research team developed a VR game involving 8 walking and balance tasks on an omnidirectional treadmill. Physical therapists and survivors of stroke tested the game in a single session and participated in a semi structured interview. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Main outcomes and measures were recruitment rate, user experiences, participant burden, technical issues, safety, and exercise dose. Descriptive statistics were calculated for feasibility outcomes and interview data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. RESULTS: Eight survivors of stroke (4 female, 4 male) and 4 female physical therapists participated in the study. Feasibility and usability targets were met, except for user experience scores and technical issues. For survivors of stroke, the mean steps taken during the VR game was 693.0 (standard deviation, SD = 223.6), they reached 66.4% SD = 10.7 of predicted maximum heart rate, and the mean game testing time was 25.5 minutes SD = 13.5. Five qualitative themes emerged: benefits of the omni-VR system, difficulties & challenges with omni-VR, suggestions for improvements, application to rehabilitation, and safety of the system. CONCLUSIONS: There is preliminary evidence for the feasibility of omni-VR for stroke rehabilitation. RELEVANCE: The VR game appears to be of adequate intensity, provides a larger number of repetitions, and is of comparable duration to traditional rehabilitation sessions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".