Virtual Reality and Assistive Technologies: A Survey <s> Summary and Analysis of VEs enhanced with exercise equipmentl <s> A relationship between physical fitness and cognition, although intuitively believable, has been difficult to document. Bamers to clarifying the relationship are the difficulties in measuring physical fitness and cognitive function, the use of differential research designs, and failures to identify and differentiate cognitive functions as well as to account for cognitive learning. Nevertheless, the fitness—cognition relationship, which continues to be reported and studied, seems compelling. It's precise nature, however, remains to be clarified. <s> BIB001 </s> Virtual Reality and Assistive Technologies: A Survey <s> Summary and Analysis of VEs enhanced with exercise equipmentl <s> The rehabilitation robot LOKOMAT has been developed at the Balgrist University Hospital to automate treadmill training of spinal cord injury and stroke patients. A virtual environment setup was implemented to increase patient's motivation and provide biofeedback, consisting of visual, acoustic and haptic modalities. Based on the knee and hip angles of the orthosis, an animated figurine moves through a virtual environment. This contribution describes the setup of the system and selected technical performance parameters. We focused on delay times caused by the setup, stability of the haptic obstacle rendering and on the level of immersion as judged by four healthy subjects. Results show that subjects judged the system's performance well (questionnaire scores over 80%). Problems exist though for obstacle rendering (questionnaire scores of 55%). <s> BIB002 </s> Virtual Reality and Assistive Technologies: A Survey <s> Summary and Analysis of VEs enhanced with exercise equipmentl <s> Abstract Instrumented treadmills are increasingly used in gait research, although the imposed walking speed is suggested to affect gait performance. A feedback-controlled treadmill that allows subjects to walk at their preferred speed, i.e. functioning in a self-paced (SP) mode, might be an attractive alternative, but could disturb gait through accelerations of the belt. We compared SP with fixed speed (FS) treadmill walking, and also considered various feedback modes. Nineteen healthy subjects walked on a dual-belt instrumented treadmill. Spatio-temporal, kinematic and kinetic gait parameters were derived from both the average stride patterns and stride-to-stride variability. For 15 out of 70 parameters significant differences were found between SP and FS. These differences were smaller than 1 cm, 1°, 0.2 N m and 0.2 W/kg for respectively stride length and width, joint kinematics, moments and powers. Since this is well within the normal stride variability, these differences were not considered to be clinically relevant, indicating that SP walking is not notably affected by belt accelerations. The long-term components of walking speed variability increased during SP walking (43%, p <s> BIB003
Stroke patients exhibited improved walking speed and posture in a VR-enhanced treadmill training system in comparison with training systems that did not incorporate VEs BIB003 . Gates et al. successfully deployed a VR-enhanced treadmill training system for the gait rehabilitation of patients with transtibial amputation BIB001 .The scope of continuous visual representation and analysis of gait using motion capture systems help trainees constantly maintain proper gait while walking on a treadmill. Research findings also demonstrated that visual stimulus of continuous visual feedback was more effective than that of nonvisual feedback in the postural balance control BIB002 ). Incorporating haptic feedback in VE and synchronizing it with the users movement on a treadmill can make the overall training environment more interesting and engaging. The scope of measurements of both kinetic and kinematic metrics of a subjects postural balance makes the findings ready for further clinical diagnosis. Adjusting task complexity according to the level of performance makes the overall training environment flexible and challenging at the same time.