A virtual reality training system for helping disabled children to acquire skills in activities of daily living

Deficiency of hand function presents difficulty to disabled people in various activities of daily living. While rehabilitation training in occupational therapy is helpful for them to cope with their deficiency, the paper presents a virtual realty based system in attempt to provide an alternative approach to complement the conventional methods. The system simulates tasks of daily living in virtual environments and produces real-time interactive graphics and forces to enable trainees to practise the skills in cyberspace. Currently, three tasks are simulated, namely, door opening, water pouring and meat cutting. Visual, audio and haptic cues are produced as guidance in response to user's actions. The performance of the users is recorded automatically on the fly with quantifiable metrics to enable objective analysis of the learning progress. Findings from initial trials with disabled children show that they found it very interesting to use the system and could adapt to the virtual training environment for practicing the tasks. Further study will be conducted to improve system usability and to evaluate the training effectiveness.