This pushes them towards a situation where they can, for example, fully open and close a fist.” Once they move their hands a little bit, this is represented in the VR experience as a more successful performance. As time goes on, it helps calibrate their hands. “Initially, users just imagine their movements and they see their hands moving in VR. “If you can’t move your hand at all, repeated practice can be very frustrating, but the games we are developing will offer a more rewarding experience,” explains Allan Ponniah, Cogitat’s CEO. To help patients practice and improve their performances in a range of hand physiotherapy exercises, Cogitat and VR production studio Unit 9 with support from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are exploring the potential for VR physiotherapy games powered by a brain-computer interface that enables a virtual hand to perform the movements that the patient is attempting to make.
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The games we are developing will offer a more rewarding experience,” explains Allan Ponniah, Cogitat’s CEO. “If you can’t move your hand at all, repeated practice can be very frustrating. Many stroke patients suffer from impaired upper limb movement due to disrupted connections between their brains and muscles, but thanks to the brain’s plasticity this can often be restored using regular physiotherapy exercises that help reconfigure the connections.
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How a virtual hand could train real movements The company is forming partnerships with VR companies and developers to use the technology for a range of applications – beginning with games that could help stroke patients recover hand movement by training with a mind-controlled VR hand.
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A virtual reality hand, controlled directly by the mind, could help stroke patients restore hand movement as part of VR-assisted physiotherapy.Ĭogitat, a startup founded last year to commercialise Imperial research, is exploring medical and gaming applications of its core technology, a brain-computer interface that allows users to move in virtual reality (VR) environments by mentally willing themselves to move rather than physically moving.