Facial Expressions-Controlled Flight Game With Haptic Feedback for Stroke Rehabilitation: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Most stroke patients suffer from a combination of motor and sensory dysfunction and central facial paralysis. Specific rehabilitation training is required to restore those functions. Current research focuses on developing stimulating and straightforward rehabilitation training processes so that patients adhere to the training at home after hospital release. This study proposes enhancing patients' enthusiasm to participate in facial muscle exercises and improving their postural perception and balance by controlling virtual objects to complete assigned tasks in virtual reality games using different facial expressions with the assistance of haptic feedback. The different rehabilitation exercises for motor, sensory, and facial dysfunctions were combined in one virtual reality game for the first time. The proposed haptic feedback device was modeled, simulated, and characterized. A user study was conducted to validate the proposed system. The experiment result shows that all the designed functions of the comprehensive stroke rehabilitation virtual reality game can be achieved. The added haptic feedback enhances the performance of the aircraft control with facial expressions by lowering the trajectory deviation by 22.57%. This implies that the proposed game may improve users' performance, thus attracting them to conduct more training.