Desenvolvimento de um sistema de biofeedback integrado utilizando realidade virtual e estímulos vibrotáteis para a reabilitação de membros inferiores

• Ano de defesa: 2019
• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, Joao Vitor Da Silva [UNIFESP]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)
• Palavras-chave em Português: Biofeedback; Electromyography; Lower Limb Rehabilitation; Transfemural Amputation; Crossmodal Feedback; Eletromiografia; Reabilitação De Membros Inferiores; Amputação Transfemoral; Feedback Crossmodal
• Link de acesso: https://sucupira.capes.gov.br/sucupira/public/consultas/coleta/trabalhoConclusao/viewTrabalhoConclusao.jsf?popup=true&id_trabalho=8001468; https://repositorio.unifesp.br/handle/11600/59909

We report the development of an Integrated Biofeedback system for the rehabilitation of Transfemural Amputees during the phase of Preprosthetic training. Our main objective developing this systema is to apply it as a rehabilitation tool, providing amputee people with an alternative to bypass the lack of sensorial information in the lost limb, one of the main causes of long-term prosthetic abandonment. The system works using the Electromyography technique to estimate the levels of muscle contraction in order to control the movements of a prosthetic leg in Virtual Reality and a matrix of vibrotactile actuators in the back of the user. In this study, we also applied this Biofeedback system on a population of healthy subjects, in a set of spatial representation tasks, mimicking the conditions expected in Transfemural Amputees. Users performed the tasks using visual feedback only, vibrotactile feedback only, and both combined. Our goal was to test if these subjects can associate the vibrotactile feedback with the movements of the virtual leg, and if that association was better than any of the feedback modalities alone in the proposed tasks. Our results show that the combination of both feedback modalities provided a better framework for spatial localization during the tasks, with all users performing satisfactorily and significantly faster as difficulty increased in the first two levels. The third level was equally more difficult for all feedback scenarios, resulting in a sistematic performance drop. In the end, the developed system fulfilled the expectations for this project, and is currently being applied in a population of people with transfemural amputation.