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Fit Again, Thanks to Virtual Reality? Ifi Article Highlights the use of Virtual Reality in the Field of Rehabilitation Medicine - 02/01/2022

With a specially developed systematic, the ifi project Next Level Sports shows new research perspectives at the interface between medicine and informatics. The article in the journal healthcare is publicly available.

Over the past 20 years, a large number of research papers have addressed the question of how virtual and augmented reality applications can be used to support rehabilitation therapies.

In a new technical publication, ifi staff member Benjamin Butz and his colleagues from Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences have presented a new system to bring medical studies and development work from the field of information technology closer together in the future. In the past, both research lines on the medical use of virtual reality had only few points of contact.

The new system is based on an evaluation of over 250 relevant publications and organizes the existing approaches to the use of virtual and augmented reality in the rehabilitation sector into thirteen overarching categories. On this basis, the article derives perspectives for further research.

The article was published in the journal healtcare and is publicly available here. The paper is part of the collaborative project Next Level Sports, in which the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences is developing mixed reality applications together with the regional practice partner medicosAufSchalke to enable new prevention and therapy services in sports and healthcare.

Next Level Sports is funded by the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry for Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy as part of the NRW Digital Model Regions funding program.