Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

CAPARE

Cueing-Assisted Personalised Augmented-Reality Exergaming for Parkinson’s rehabilitation

Technology in Motion group of the Department of Human Movement Sciences

Science and technology for measuring and improving movement is evolving rapidly, especially so in the XR field. As Technology in Motion group we have a strong drive to generate tangible societal impact, with our commercially available AR rehabilitation treadmill C-Mill as flagship innovation. We are now fully focused on building AR/MR solutions for treating gait disabilities, including fall risk and freezing of gait in Parkinson’s disease, fit for crossing the frontier of care delivery: at home.

Project Objective

The objective of project CAPARE is to bring Cueing-Assisted AR therapeutic gait-and-balance Exergaming in people with Parkinson’s disease from TRL4 to TRL8 by implementing an AR cue personalization protocol and a remote gait-and-balance monitoring pipeline based on AR data-science into CAPARE, before examining its clinical feasibility in a multicenter pilot randomized controlled trial terms of safety, adherence, patient experience and efficacy.

Context

Examples of 2D and 3D augmented-reality cueing to assist Parkinsonian gait, to be personalized in terms of type of cues and intercue distance

Augmented-Reality Exergaming for home-based gait-and-balance therapy for patients with Parkinson’s disease

Example AR headset data of a structured gait-and-balance assessment that is used a lot by clinicians. AR data seem useful for getting test-completion times (i.e., clinical test score) but provide finer-grained information about movement quality as well (e.g., fluency, durations of sits or stands)

Project Goals

1.

Cueing is effective for improving Parkinsonian gait, but ‘one-size-fits-all’ cueing does not exist. We will make cueing more effective through a personalized AR cue selection protocol

2.

AR exergaming is promising for at-home gait-and-balance therapy in people with Parkinson’s. We will improve its inclusiveness to people with freezing of gait by adding personalized cues to exergames

3.

Gait and balance therapy is often prescribed at home, but therapists are blind as to what happens there. We will exploit AR data science to remotely monitor therapy adherence and progress in gait and balance