Originally published in the journal Social Paediatrics and Rehabilitation.
An article by Briolight founder Andrii Vasyliev about interactive technologies in rehabilitation.
The Akmea comprehensive rehabilitation centre and Ukrainian electronics developer Briolight jointly developed an interactive room for a new social rehabilitation centre at 37H Olena Teliha Street in Kyiv.
The article described interactive systems as a means of encouraging children to practise movements and skills through play. It discussed activities linked to physical therapy, sensory integration and educational support for children with varied developmental needs. These historical observations should not be interpreted as proof of clinical effectiveness for a specific condition.
The room brought together several ways of controlling a virtual environment:
Interactive floor and wall. Each projection surface measured 250 × 157 cm and used wear-resistant covering. Movement-sensitive projected images responded to children's activity along the surfaces.
Kinect system with a 65-inch LCD panel. Body-motion tracking provided coordinates to interactive applications so that children could interact with games by moving their arms, legs and torso.
Leap Motion hand-tracking system. A tabletop sensor captured hand and finger movements at distances of up to approximately 50 cm. Exercises included shaping virtual clay, removing petals from a digital flower and navigating a map with hand movements.
Large Android-based interactive display. A 108 cm diagonal LCD screen mounted on a mobile stand supported educational applications and the development of new specialist software. The modular design also allowed additional peripherals such as microphones, sensors, buttons, joysticks and room-lighting controls.
The article presented opportunities for clinicians to propose tailored software tasks, researchers to collect data about rehabilitation methods, and centres or foundations to assemble equipment configurations around their particular needs.
Local development and production in Ukraine also made technical support and servicing an important part of the model.
