UrbanRehab: a virtual urban scenario design tool for rehabilitating instrumental activities of daily living

Abstract

The increased life expectancy poses certain challenges such as bringing the required facilities to the elderly or infirm to help them keep their autonomy as long as possible. At any age, we are all prone to diseases or accidents that can affect our autonomy for activities we perform daily, the so-called Activities of Daily Living (ADL). After the ability to perform some ADLs is lost or reduced to some extent, a rehabilitation process is required. Doing rehabilitation in a controlled environment, such as a virtual one, brings interesting benefits, such as precise monitoring, a safe environment or a rehabilitation setting customized to each user’s progress. In this work, we present UrbanRehab, a tool designed in collaboration with specialists aimed at building customized rehabilitation experiences especially for Instrumental Activities of Daily Living that runs in a virtual urban environment (VUE) that can be built by the specialist visually by adding new buildings, street junctions, traffic lights or even dynamic objects such as people or cars. Billboards can be placed in the virtual scenario to provide further assistance to the user whenever required. The user interacts with the VUE by moving around in a natural manner. To assess the tool, an acceptance evaluation was conducted inspired by an UAUT2 model. Thirty specialists took part in this evaluation. The specialists gave the tool a score greater than 5 out of 7 for Behavioral Intention, thus showing the interest of these specialists in using our tool in a clinical environment.