"Virtual ability simulation" to boost rehabilitation exercise performance and confidence for people with disability

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a concept called virtual ability simulation (VAS) for people with disability in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a VAS people with disabilities 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 than without a VAS. 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.