Virtual rehabilitation system

With increasing costs for care giving as well as the number of persons requiring rehabilitation exercises, providing tele-rehabilitation programs becomes very attractive. In this paper, we propose a distributed virtual rehabilitation system which provides real-time interactions between patients and remote physicians. Specifically, using portable immersive facilities, along with a haptics-based exercise platform, therapist is able to assess and guide the patients with wearable body sensors at a different location. Instead of the expensive haptic force feedback communications over the Internet, we use different kinds of virtual 3D models in the virtual environments and keep a consistent simulation of deformable models over networks. Our system offers an interesting and flexible method which makes the rehabilitation an engaging process for both patients and physicians.