Effects of Adding Force Control to a VR Game on Brain Activation

One of the major contributor for the lower quality of living in the aged population, is the reduction in hand function. To mitigate this, several virtual-reality based hand rehabilitation/training systems have been developed. However, most of these systems are solely controlled by hand gestures, and do not incorporate the force between the fingertips. Which is not the case for grabbing things in real life. With that in mind, the researchers assumed that a virtual-reality based hand rehabilitation/training system that incorporates force control into its input can be more beneficial in terms of recovering one's hand function. To test out this claim, subjects were recruited and tasked to play a game using both input systems (wfc and wofc), while their brain activity while using both input system was simultaneously recorded using functional near infrared spectroscopy and compared