Abstract
BackgroundApplication of virtual environment (VE) technology to motor rehabilitation increases the number of possible rehabilitation tasks and/or exercises. However, enhancing a specific sensory stimulus sometimes causes unpleasant sensations or fatigue, which would in turn decrease motivation for continuous rehabilitation. To select appropriate tasks and/or exercises for individuals, evaluation of physical activity during recovery is necessary, particularly the changes in the relationship between autonomic nervous activity (ANA) and sensory stimuli.MethodsWe estimated the ANA from the R-R interval time series of electrocardiogram and incoming sensory stimuli that would activate the ANA. For experiments in real exercise, we measured vehicle data and electromyogram signals during cycling exercise. For experiments in virtual exercise, we measured eye movement in relation to image motion vectors while the subject was viewing a mountain-bike video image from a first-person viewpoint.ResultsFor the real cycling exercise, the results were categorized into four groups by evaluating muscle fatigue in relation to the ANA. They suggested that fatigue should be evaluated on the basis of not only muscle activity but also autonomic nervous regulation after exercise. For the virtual exercise, the ANA-related conditions revealed a remarkable time distribution of trigger points that would change eye movement and evoke unpleasant sensations.ConclusionFor expanding the options of motor rehabilitation using VE technology, approaches need to be developed for simultaneously monitoring and separately evaluating the activation of autonomic nervous regulation in relation to neuromuscular and sensory systems with different time scales.
Highlights
It takes a long time for functional recovery in motor rehabilitation, and providing appropriate tasks and/or exercises during the progression of recovery is necessary to continue promoting motor rehabilitation with sufficient effectiveness, as well to motivate the patient
Since autonomic nervous regulation should be evaluated after incoming stimuli, we focused on the specific sections before and after climbing a hill on a bicycle in the real world (Figure 1(a)) and the sections specified by the behavior of autonomic nervous activity (ANA)-related indices in the virtual world (Figure 1(c))
We used the γARV-mean power frequency (MPF) immediately before the hilltop because the samples for the positive γARV-MPF region showed the largest shift in prRSA in relation to climbing efforts
Summary
It takes a long time for functional recovery in motor rehabilitation, and providing appropriate tasks and/or exercises during the progression of recovery is necessary to continue promoting motor rehabilitation with sufficient effectiveness, as well to motivate the patient. Enhancing or augmenting a specific sensory stimulus in a VE sometimes causes unpleasant sensations due to conflicts among sensory stimuli (sensory conflict theory [2]). This problem in a VE has been referred to as "cybersickness" in relation to simulator sickness and motion sickness [3,4]. Application of virtual environment (VE) technology to motor rehabilitation increases the number of possible rehabilitation tasks and/or exercises. To select appropriate tasks and/or exercises for individuals, evaluation of physical activity during recovery is necessary, the changes in the relationship between autonomic nervous activity (ANA) and sensory stimuli
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