Virtual Ability Simulation: Applying Rotational Gain to the Leg to Increase Confidence During Physical Rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper investigates a concept called Virtual Ability Simulation (VAS) for people with disability due to Multiple Sclerosis (MS), in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a VAS people with a disability perform tasks that are made easier in the virtual environment (VE) compared to the real world. We hypothesized that putting people with disabilities in a VAS will increase confidence and enable more efficient task completion. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a within-subjects experiment in which participants performed a virtual task called ''kick the ball'' in two different conditions: a no gain condition (i.e., same difficulty as in the real world) and a rotational gain condition (i.e., physically easier than the real world but visually the same). The results from our study suggest that VAS increased participants' confidence which in turn enables them to perceive the difficulty of the same task easier.