Ezra Ozery: Gamification of physical therapy in VR 

Research by graduate student, Ezra Ozery: "Gamification of home motoric rehabilitation through VR" Transcript: Conventional physical therapy requires doing small tedious tasks repetitively, like transferring marbles from one bowl to another. How long can a person maintain this kind of activity? 10 minutes? An hour? How about doing it every day until you get better? To Ezra Ozery, industrial design researcher, this seems impossible. Ezra has been creating games in virtual reality that seamlessly integrate into a patients physical therapy process. Virtual reality is perfect for this purpose because it allows interactions with the environment that are not possible in the real world. This research focuses on patients with orthopaedic conditions like spine vulnerability, scoliosis and kyphosis. The games in VR implement gamification elements that create movement in the real word: Customising elements of the game make it possible to create an array of motion and tailor the game to the player’s abilities. This experiment attempts to create therapy games that are fun, and make the player move and exercise without realising it.