philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

USC researcher uses virtual reality — and her mother’s sewing machine — to treat stroke survivors

Sook-Lei Liew builds a prototype with a laptop, an off-the-shelf VR rig, a $9 swim cap and a brain-computer interface system

It was almost by chance that USC researcher Sook-Lei Liew started thinking about virtual reality. She was a neuroscientist; so was her husband. When she became a USC faculty member in 2015, her husband got a job in the Mixed Reality Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies — and, between the two, a brain trust was born between VR and stroke rehab.

“There was a lot of tech, but not a lot of science behind it,” said Liew, who has joint appointments with the USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy and the Department of Neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Liew started to dig into VR research and found some fascinating studies about bodies inside a VR system. One study showed that if you give someone an avatar with long arms in the virtual world, they interact with the real world as if they had long arms. The effect even lasts for 10 or 15 minutes after a person removes the VR headset.

That made Liew wonder something that would change her work forever: “If you give someone a healthy body in VR, will that help them recover their health?”

She launched a project in early 2016, submitting a grant proposal to the American Heart Association and receiving $150,000 to explore the possibility of a VR brain-computer interface to treat stroke survivors.

The team built a prototype, using a laptop computer, an off-the-shelf VR rig, a $9 swim cap and an open-source brain-computer interface electroenchepalogram (EEG) system. Liew used her mother’s sewing machine to connect the electrodes to the cap. The whole system costs less than $5,000. It’s called REINVENT: Rehabilitation Environment using the Integration of Neuromuscular-based Virtual Enhancements for Neural Training

This is how it works: The system uses virtual reality as well as brain and muscle sensors to show arm and hand movement in the virtual world when the patient has used the correct brain and muscle signals even if the patient cannot move his or her arm or hand in the real world. Over time, they can train the damaged circuits to work again.

{from video - "We take signals from your brain, and we take signals from your muscles, and when those signals indicate that you are trying to move, then in virtual reality your arm moves, even if your arm doesn't really move in the real world."}

So far, the system has only been tested on healthy older adults, but, in the next six months, it will be tested on people recovering from a stroke.

The team demonstrated the project at the South by Southwest festival this year, and the experience was mind-bending for Liew.

“Our booth was across the hall from NASA, and they had a Mars habitat

“Most of the demonstrated uses for VR are gaming or entertainment right now,” Liew pointed out. “But the future has got to include VR for health care, too.”
Are people in the future going to be controlling houses and cars with their brains? Liew thinks it’s unlikely.

See the full story here: http://news.usc.edu/122574/usc-researcher-uses-virtual-reality-and-her-mothers-sewing-machine-to-treat-stroke-survivors/