Virtual Recovery • Dr. Isabel Van De Keere

(Founder and CEO, Immersive Rehab || London UK)

“I create digital therapeutics to help people who have had a stroke, spinal injury, MS etc. improve their motor skills and overall ability to function independently. Currently, rehabilitation exercises involve putting small wooden pegs into a hole, squeezing a ball, moving your arm up and down — they are boring and don’t give any feedback, so patients don’t want to do them. We use virtual reality to create an immersive environment where you can interact with 3D objects to do real-world tasks, like cooking or coordinated exercises. Since VR objects don’t have any weight, patients who don’t have the strength to interact with physical objects can perform real-world tasks much earlier. The visual stimulation of VR also helps your brain link a movement to an object, so it can speed up and enhance recovery. The headsets are still evolving — in 3–5 years they will look like a pair of glasses and hopefully be much cheaper and accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

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Ten years ago I had an accident that left me with a head injury, neck injury, and severe vertigo. I learned what it is to lose your mobility in a second, and what it is to go through a long rehab period to get back to how I was. When I was moved from a hospital to a home setting I spent so long just waiting in my bed for people to help me — for the ambulance or someone to take me to the hospital or to the therapist — while I could have been doing something to get better. My background in mechanical and biomedical engineering got me thinking about how I could make the rehab process more engaging. The VR idea formed during my rehab, but at the time I didn’t have the tools or means to advance. It took a couple of years to get started, and now 10 years later we are in clinical trials!

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Before the accident, work was the priority and health came second. After, I realised the only thing that’s important is your physical and mental health — if that’s not in order then the rest fails. It helped me to be brave and make big decisions.”

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Check out Isabel’s company here: https://immersiverehab.com/