International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation (ISVR) newsletter - 4th Issue
In the forth issue of the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation (ISVR) newsletter, we have many news and exciting contributions. ISVR has a new president and 3 new board members, we are featuring the International Clinic of Rehabilitation in Truskavets and LabHuman in Valencia, and we have a contributed article by Jorge Hernández Franco et al.I hope you like it!
Find more information at http://www.isvr.org
Message from the president:
"As the new President of the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation, it gives me great pleasure to communicate all the exciting news and upcoming events of the Society. But first, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome 3 new members to the Board of Directors of ISVR, Philippe Archambault from McGill University, Roberto Lloréns Rodriguez from the Universitat Politècnica de València and Sergi Bermudez i Badia from the University of Madeira. At the same time, we would like to sincerely thank the following Board members for their past years of service whose terms of office have come to an end: Joyce Fung, Albert (Skip) Rizzo and Daniel Thalmann.
This year has seen the expansion of our VR family by the formation of new collaborations between ISVR and sister societies at the regional and international level. These now number 6 with the addition of the International Industry Society in Advanced Rehabilitation Technology (IISART) (www.iisartonline.org) and Laval Virtual. In particular, in April, two of our members (Mindy Levin, Tamar Weiss) made virtual presentations at the “Journée scientifique Handicap et Réalité Virtuelle (JHRV)” organized by ISVR member Evelyne Klinger. The increasing participation at conferences and events by our members highlights the growing worldwide interest in virtual reality as a promising rehabilitation intervention.
The newsletter team has put together another excellent issue of the ISVR newsletter to highlight the activities of our members and to keep our membership informed of new developments in the field of virtual rehabilitation. In this issue, the Technology Profile spotlight is on Labhuman, located in Valencia whose scientific coordinator is Dr. Roberto Lloréns Rodriguez. Roberto’s lab includes a multidisciplinary team of specialists with an interest in using digital technologies to enhance human mobility and quality of life, through motor and cognitive rehabilitation. Labhuman’s low-cost rehabilitation systems for balance retraining are now becoming available to the world market. The Clinical Profile section of the newsletter highlights the Innovation Technologies Department and Information Center of the International Clinic of Rehabilitation in Truskavets, Ukraine, headed by Oleh Kachmar. This clinic mainly services clients with cerebral palsy and other neurological disorders using both commercial and custom-made virtual applications for balance rehabilitation. They have also been involved in small scale clinical research projects with this technology. The article points out some of the barriers to the use of virtual rehabilitation in home settings that will be of interest to many of you. In our Contributed Article section, authors Jorge Hernández Franco, Felipe Orihuela-Espina, Ron Leder and Luis Enrique Sucar have contributed a thought provoking article about the need for virtual rehabilitation technologies to be adaptive to patient needs. They describe their own system, called Gesture Therapy, as an example of such adaptive technology that incorporates reinforcement learning using a Markov decisionmaking process. They argue for the need to incorporate adaptive algorithms into virtual rehabilitation applications in particular for home-based tele-rehabilitation, in addition to algorithms for monitoring patient progress.
As a recurring feature of our newsletter, in this issue you will also find links to two new publications written by Paul Sharkey and Joav Merrick as well as a call for contributors for a new book focusing on rehabilitation technologies to be published by Springer in July 2016 and edited by Sheryl Braham, Anthony Brooks, Bill Kapralos, Lakhmi Jain.
Finally, it is with great anticipation that we look forward to meeting from June 9-12 in Valencia, Spain for the ICVR 2015 bi-annual meeting during the RehabWeek event. We are hoping for a large member turnout so come out and get involved in your Society!
Mindy Levin President, ISVR"
Comments