OctaVis: A Virtual Reality System for Clinical Studies and Rehabilitation

Brain function disorders, resulting for instance from stroke, epilepsy, or other incidents can be partially recovered by rehabilitation training. Performing neuro-rehabilitation in virtual reality systems allows for training scenarios close to daily tasks, is easily adaptable to the patients’ needs, is fully controllable by clinical staff, and guarantees patient safety at all times. In this paper, we describe the OCTAVIS system, a novel virtual reality platform developed primary for clinical studies with and rehabilitation training of patients with brain function disorders. To meet the special requirements for clinical use, our system has been designed with ease of use, ease of maintenance, patient safety, space and cost efficiency in mind. Our system has been successfully deployed to four hospitals, where it is used for rehabilitation training and clinical studies. We report first results of these studies, demonstrating that our system is immersive, easy to use, and supportive for rehabilitation purposes.