you
[Music]
[Applause]
from 2008 to 2009 I was in graduate
school studying a very simple task
walking now walking is a fundamental
skill the practically everybody on earth
figures out how to do within the first
year of life however walking is
incredibly complex if you think about
all of the pieces that are involved your
body is made up of 206 bones over 600
muscles and millions of nerves and
neurons and all of those pieces have to
work together in order to keep you from
falling down and falling is that one of
the leading causes of injuries in the
United States so we did a lot of work
trying to figure out how do all these
pieces talk to each other in order to
reduce fall risk now as I was studying
this in grad school the story got very
personal for me
I saw my father fall for the very first
time and many of you in the room can
attest to the feeling of the very first
time you see your parents in a
vulnerable situation it shakes you to
the core now I knew my father was human
and eventually aging would catch up to
him I wasn’t ready to see it
my parents were high school sweethearts
got married right after high school had
me one year and 15 days later so I had
the privilege of growing up with rather
young parents and my father was always
available to play outside with me of
course he was much bigger and stronger
than I was but he always let me put up a
challenge this combined with the fact
that my father worked a manual labor job
led me to see my father as a
larger-than-life figure someone who was
strong full of wisdom and could do
anything he set his mind to now the
first time I saw my father fall that
shook me to the core I wasn’t ready to
see that but it’s inevitable and it
happens so aging combined with some
numbness in his feet that stem from back
surgery a couple of decades ago I knew
would eventually catch up with him and
it did
now I’m happy to report that my father
has lived a relatively injury-free life
since then he’s figured out how to cope
with the numbness in his feet to walk
around without having more false but not
everybody has that luxury I ask you to
perform this thought experiment with me
close your eyes now imagine all the
sudden your ability to walk was taken
away how would you get out of this
auditorium
how would you cross the street how would
you walk up the stairs in your home now
open your eyes I ask you to perform that
thought experiment with me because all
of the activities that just described
are called activities of daily living if
your ability to do them is diminished or
even taken away that can severely change
how you interact with the world and it
also can change your quality of life
so we’d studied in graduate school all
of the pieces of the body how it all
works together ultimately so we could
better understand how to reduce fall
risk and enhance quality of life and one
way we could potentially do that is
through the use of virtual reality now
you may be wondering how a scientist
that studies how we walk around without
falling over ultimately ends up using
virtual reality to keep us from falling
down well in graduate school we weren’t
just studying fall risk what we’re
actually studying is how when humans
walk around the world they use visual
information to control their walking
behavior now I presume all of you walked
into this building today without running
into each other or into a wall but how
did you do that as someone was
approaching you on the sidewalk you
didn’t stop and say okay you go this way
and I’m going to go that way you didn’t
do that we don’t have that verbal
communication when you’re moving
throughout the world what you did was
you look to see well what direction are
they going how fast are they going
where’s the edge of the hallway okay I’m
going to choose this path and we use
that visual information to ultimately
drive our walking behavior so that we
don’t run into things or trip on things
and ultimately reduces our fall risk
so we did a lot of studies in graduate
school trying to figure out how do we
use this visual information ultimately
to control our walking behavior this is
when the lightbulb went on for me what
if we could control the visual
information coming into the system to
ultimately get the desired motor output
what if we could put someone in virtual
reality
have them interact with that virtual
environment and ultimately use that to
drive their walking ability so this is
what led me to a two-and-a-half year
postdoc in a virtual reality lab where I
studied how we can merge virtual reality
and physical therapy together now
virtual reality is simply an environment
in which the user can interact with it’s
a computer-generated environment and we
can make that computer-generated
environment to be whatever we want it to
be in this particular example we’ve
created a virtual road and some virtual
Cooper minis were imported into that
road and they just zoom up and down that
road and your job is to cross that road
so this is just one example of how we
can create a virtual environment and
there’s lots of different ways in which
virtual environments have been shown or
can be shown to the user one way is
through the use of a big projection
screen in front of a treadmill and as
the participant is walking on the
treadmill that virtual environment is
moving toward them in this case a
virtual hallway so it sort of feels like
they’re walking through this virtual
hallway now this is somewhat realistic
because it kind of feels like you’re
interacting with the virtual environment
but in your periphery you can still see
the room isn’t moving that virtual
environment is so it’s somewhat
realistic if we want to make it even
more realistic we can use a headset such
as the one here in the picture this
headset allows the user to see the
virtual environment through the lenses
but there’s sensors in that headset and
those sensors update the virtual
environment as you move around so you
take a step forward that virtual
environment comes at you as you take a
step backwards that virtual environment
moves away it feels like you’re inside
the video game this can now have a whole
lot more applications because you’re
truly immersed within this virtual
environment now
researchers have long had a pipe dream
of using virtual reality within a
clinical setting but one of those
barriers is the cost and another one is
the bulkiness the cost of the headset
that you see here in the picture is the
first headset that we purchased for our
research laboratory six years ago cost
thirty seven thousand dollars it’s more
than a lot of new cars so this was never
something that was going to be widely
accepted in a clinical community the
cost and price point was just too high
so how in the world can we use virtual
reality than for physical therapy if we
have these barriers well luckily there’s
been some acceleration in the virtual
reality community in the last several
years and that acceleration has been
fueled by Facebook the first tour the
social interaction company social media
company Facebook has been on the leading
edge of social interaction since its
inception and they’ve always been
looking for new ways that they can have
their users socially interact and one
way that they think that this may happen
in the future is you put on your headset
in your home and you put on your headset
in your home and poof you’re in the same
virtual environment having a social
interaction now this was not going to
work if we had $37,000 headsets out
there this isn’t something that was
going to be widely adopted but Facebook
was thinking about this several years
ago at about the same time there was a
company in California called oculus VR
and that company had the goal of
creating headsets for the masses
primarily for the gaming industry and
they created a product that was starting
to catch a lot of people’s attention so
in 2012 they had a Kickstarter campaign
and raised 250 million dollars for their
headset company yeah a lot of people
took notice of this including Facebook
who was thinking about using social
interaction but they needed a
deliverable and a headset that more
people could use two short years later
Facebook purchased oculus VR
two billion dollars in 2014
Facebook at that point jumped headfirst
into the virtual reality community there
are a lot of other large companies that
were thinking about how they could use
virtual reality for their users
primarily for the entertainment industry
so what that caused was a acceleration
across a large number of companies to
say Oh Facebook’s in here
they’re Greeks they’re doing their
research and development we need to get
into it too and many of you may have
seen a lot of the commercials Samsung
and some other companies of how they use
their own headsets for their
entertainment purposes in fact the
smartphone many of you have in your
pocket can be used as a headset these
days so depending on the resolution
fidelity so forth there’s lots of
options and the price point has
significantly dropped the price point
for headset this headset was $37,000 the
price point for headsets these days I’ll
show you an example here in a moment is
on the order of hundreds of dollars six
short years virtual reality has become a
reality for us now virtual reality then
two or three years ago as the headset
industry was developing was still
primarily used in the gaming industry so
think about how the typical gamer
experience goes it’s a user sitting on a
couch with a controller and they’re
staring at the TV screen and that TV
screen has their virtual character
running through the virtual environment
and they’re controlling that with the
headset or thick controller now through
the use of a headset that puts that user
inside the video game they are literally
seeing everything from a first-person
view in the early versions you still had
to control your movement with a
controller like you see here in the
picture but at least it made it a more
immersive experience you weren’t just
staring at a TV screen off in the
distance now there’s been advancements
even in the last year that have made
this even more realistic the gaming
experience no longer necessarily feels
like a game but a truly immersive
experience and that’s through technology
that has motion capture cameras small
little cubes that you can put on
opposite sides of your living room those
cubes track exactly where you are with
your headset so once you put on your
headset if
you walk forward those cubes now up he
just went forward better update that
virtual environment and it does it all
in real time what this is done is turned
your living room into the game you can
now move around in a virtual game and
more dynamically interact with some of
these characters and the controllers
that you see in the picture here are
also linked up to that virtual
environment so you as you are in virtual
reality you see your virtual hands and
those controllers even have small little
tactile sensors basically little
vibration mechanisms in them so if
there’s a little virtual dog that is
jumping around at your feet you can bend
over and pet that virtual dog your
controller will vibrate this immersive
experience has really been changed and
accelerated to make it a much more
realistic experience because of the
advancement in the entertainment and
social media industries we’re now at a
place where we can start thinking about
repurposing this technology to address
human health challenges if you think
back to the previous picture we
researchers were long thinking about
using this but the headset was too big
and too bulky too expensive the headset
you see in the pictures eight hundred
bucks down from thirty seven thousand
dollars six or short years ago it’s also
portable comes in the size of about a
briefcase so we’re no longer constrained
of just being in the laboratory we can
go to the patient we no longer have the
burden of the burden of that patient
coming to us so this opens up a whole
new world of ways that we could
virtually train people one of those ways
that we started using virtual reality to
retrain people is through showing an
avatar on a projection screen and that
avatars in a virtual environment and we
control how that avatar walks and when
the participant is walking on the
treadmill we ask them to play the same
game many of us played in kindergarten
follow the leader
so whatever that avatar does you do your
best to mimic those motions and we’ve
had stroke survivors come into the
laboratory to participate in these
experiments because stroke survivors
commonly have an asymmetrical walking
pattern one leg one leg
lags behind the other sometimes and one
of the goals of physical therapy is to
make their walking patterns more
symmetrical which helps reduce fall risk
so we control that virtual environment
we can make that avatar have an
asymmetrical walking pattern but not
quite as asymmetrical as the patient
this gives that patient a visual
prescription of what we want them to do
but also an attainable behavior that
they can slowly move their beat their
pattern their walking patterns to toured
as the patient gets better and becomes a
little bit more symmetrical then we take
that avatar and make it more symmetrical
so it’s the carrot in front of the horse
model where we’re always giving the
patient and attainable task but we
slowly bring them along to have them
walk more symmetrical this is an example
of the utility virtual reality we can
make it do whatever we want to tailor
our rehabilitation to the patient
population of interest this opens up a
world of possibilities for us to think
about precise and individualized
medicine for a variety of different
populations another way that we’ve used
virtual reality through this projection
screen system is we’ve created virtual
obstacles for the participants to step
over and these are primarily for people
who are at a higher risk of falling so
we teach them to step over these virtual
obstacles as they’re doing this training
in virtual reality now these aren’t just
virtual reality isn’t just useful in a
physical rehabilitation context but can
be used to address a wide range of human
health challenges it’s been used to
overcome phobias such as public speaking
there are companies out there that have
created mock-ups of auditoriums for
people that have a phobia of speaking
and for in public the public and then
what they do is they put on the headset
and have 200 avatar staring at you as
you walk around this is a way to
overcome that stressor it’s also been
used in other areas such as veterans who
have PTSD there’s a group that has
created virtual Iraq and it’s for
veterans that are part of an immersion
therapy program
in which they slowly get immersed back
into virtual Iraq to desensitize them to
that stressor so across a wide range of
human health challenges virtual reality
can be adopted to help address those
problems now all of those examples that
I described to you were primarily done
in the research laboratory until
recently but because we have these new
affordable and portable systems we can
now dream about getting out of the
laboratory however there’s one missing
piece here there’s one missing piece
that if we ask someone to get better at
the game and they do does that matter
and the answer that is no I don’t really
care if the patients that we’re working
with get better in the game that’s not
the end game for me the end game for our
research team is does it transfer to the
real world because if it doesn’t
transfer that change in behavior doesn’t
transfer to the real world then what are
we doing and why are we doing it so
there’s the next phase of experiments
that have been looking at this
retraining and virtual reality and then
looking at transfer to real-world
behavior in our lab and a number of
other labs have looked at this and I’m
happy to report to you that there are
studies now showing that if we retrain
you how to walk over virtual obstacles
that transfers into how you walk over
real obstacles and the real world so we
now have a system where we can retrain
behaviors in a very precise and specific
way and in a safe way so that we can
transfer it to the real world and
ultimately reduce fall risk it also
offers the opportunity to more dynamic
research projects and when we ask people
to do these more activities of daily
living so in this case going back to the
example of crossing the street this is a
game that we created called human
Frogger many of you may remember the old
arcade game called Frogger where you had
to get a frog across the street before
he got run over by a car that’s an
activity of daily living a lot of us
probably did before we walked into this
building but it’s a challenge
J activity for a number of patient
populations and so with human Frogger we
put on a helmet we put you at this
street intersection and your job is to
cross the street now if a patient has a
real challenge in walking we can make
that a single lane road with a virtual
car moving really slow but if it’s a
more advanced patient then we can make
an eight Lane superhighway and virtual
cars going all over and said good luck
okay so it gives us a really unique way
to test functional capabilities and
mobility across a variety of populations
so where do we go from here I’ve taken
you through the historical development
of this and we’re right on the precipice
of repurposing virtual reality to
address human health challenges there’s
an effort right now across the North
Carolina system all the schools in the
UNC system to link up the virtual
reality labs that all are addressing
human health challenges and these are
folks in computer science and
kinesiology and physical therapy and
biomedical engineering and others we now
have the ability to link up these labs
so we can address human health
challenges in a very unique and
synergistic way and ultimately address
human health challenges at the grandest
level in ways that we’ve never thought
about before so I ask you to consider
participating in these experiments if
you hear about them virtual reality is
no longer this futuristic tool it’s here
and the future of your health may rely
on it thank you
[Music]
[Applause]
from 2008 to 2009 I was in graduate
school studying a very simple task
walking now walking is a fundamental
skill the practically everybody on earth
figures out how to do within the first
year of life however walking is
incredibly complex if you think about
all of the pieces that are involved your
body is made up of 206 bones over 600
muscles and millions of nerves and
neurons and all of those pieces have to
work together in order to keep you from
falling down and falling is that one of
the leading causes of injuries in the
United States so we did a lot of work
trying to figure out how do all these
pieces talk to each other in order to
reduce fall risk now as I was studying
this in grad school the story got very
personal for me
I saw my father fall for the very first
time and many of you in the room can
attest to the feeling of the very first
time you see your parents in a
vulnerable situation it shakes you to
the core now I knew my father was human
and eventually aging would catch up to
him I wasn’t ready to see it
my parents were high school sweethearts
got married right after high school had
me one year and 15 days later so I had
the privilege of growing up with rather
young parents and my father was always
available to play outside with me of
course he was much bigger and stronger
than I was but he always let me put up a
challenge this combined with the fact
that my father worked a manual labor job
led me to see my father as a
larger-than-life figure someone who was
strong full of wisdom and could do
anything he set his mind to now the
first time I saw my father fall that
shook me to the core I wasn’t ready to
see that but it’s inevitable and it
happens so aging combined with some
numbness in his feet that stem from back
surgery a couple of decades ago I knew
would eventually catch up with him and
it did
now I’m happy to report that my father
has lived a relatively injury-free life
since then he’s figured out how to cope
with the numbness in his feet to walk
around without having more false but not
everybody has that luxury I ask you to
perform this thought experiment with me
close your eyes now imagine all the
sudden your ability to walk was taken
away how would you get out of this
auditorium
how would you cross the street how would
you walk up the stairs in your home now
open your eyes I ask you to perform that
thought experiment with me because all
of the activities that just described
are called activities of daily living if
your ability to do them is diminished or
even taken away that can severely change
how you interact with the world and it
also can change your quality of life
so we’d studied in graduate school all
of the pieces of the body how it all
works together ultimately so we could
better understand how to reduce fall
risk and enhance quality of life and one
way we could potentially do that is
through the use of virtual reality now
you may be wondering how a scientist
that studies how we walk around without
falling over ultimately ends up using
virtual reality to keep us from falling
down well in graduate school we weren’t
just studying fall risk what we’re
actually studying is how when humans
walk around the world they use visual
information to control their walking
behavior now I presume all of you walked
into this building today without running
into each other or into a wall but how
did you do that as someone was
approaching you on the sidewalk you
didn’t stop and say okay you go this way
and I’m going to go that way you didn’t
do that we don’t have that verbal
communication when you’re moving
throughout the world what you did was
you look to see well what direction are
they going how fast are they going
where’s the edge of the hallway okay I’m
going to choose this path and we use
that visual information to ultimately
drive our walking behavior so that we
don’t run into things or trip on things
and ultimately reduces our fall risk
so we did a lot of studies in graduate
school trying to figure out how do we
use this visual information ultimately
to control our walking behavior this is
when the lightbulb went on for me what
if we could control the visual
information coming into the system to
ultimately get the desired motor output
what if we could put someone in virtual
reality
have them interact with that virtual
environment and ultimately use that to
drive their walking ability so this is
what led me to a two-and-a-half year
postdoc in a virtual reality lab where I
studied how we can merge virtual reality
and physical therapy together now
virtual reality is simply an environment
in which the user can interact with it’s
a computer-generated environment and we
can make that computer-generated
environment to be whatever we want it to
be in this particular example we’ve
created a virtual road and some virtual
Cooper minis were imported into that
road and they just zoom up and down that
road and your job is to cross that road
so this is just one example of how we
can create a virtual environment and
there’s lots of different ways in which
virtual environments have been shown or
can be shown to the user one way is
through the use of a big projection
screen in front of a treadmill and as
the participant is walking on the
treadmill that virtual environment is
moving toward them in this case a
virtual hallway so it sort of feels like
they’re walking through this virtual
hallway now this is somewhat realistic
because it kind of feels like you’re
interacting with the virtual environment
but in your periphery you can still see
the room isn’t moving that virtual
environment is so it’s somewhat
realistic if we want to make it even
more realistic we can use a headset such
as the one here in the picture this
headset allows the user to see the
virtual environment through the lenses
but there’s sensors in that headset and
those sensors update the virtual
environment as you move around so you
take a step forward that virtual
environment comes at you as you take a
step backwards that virtual environment
moves away it feels like you’re inside
the video game this can now have a whole
lot more applications because you’re
truly immersed within this virtual
environment now
researchers have long had a pipe dream
of using virtual reality within a
clinical setting but one of those
barriers is the cost and another one is
the bulkiness the cost of the headset
that you see here in the picture is the
first headset that we purchased for our
research laboratory six years ago cost
thirty seven thousand dollars it’s more
than a lot of new cars so this was never
something that was going to be widely
accepted in a clinical community the
cost and price point was just too high
so how in the world can we use virtual
reality than for physical therapy if we
have these barriers well luckily there’s
been some acceleration in the virtual
reality community in the last several
years and that acceleration has been
fueled by Facebook the first tour the
social interaction company social media
company Facebook has been on the leading
edge of social interaction since its
inception and they’ve always been
looking for new ways that they can have
their users socially interact and one
way that they think that this may happen
in the future is you put on your headset
in your home and you put on your headset
in your home and poof you’re in the same
virtual environment having a social
interaction now this was not going to
work if we had $37,000 headsets out
there this isn’t something that was
going to be widely adopted but Facebook
was thinking about this several years
ago at about the same time there was a
company in California called oculus VR
and that company had the goal of
creating headsets for the masses
primarily for the gaming industry and
they created a product that was starting
to catch a lot of people’s attention so
in 2012 they had a Kickstarter campaign
and raised 250 million dollars for their
headset company yeah a lot of people
took notice of this including Facebook
who was thinking about using social
interaction but they needed a
deliverable and a headset that more
people could use two short years later
Facebook purchased oculus VR
two billion dollars in 2014
Facebook at that point jumped headfirst
into the virtual reality community there
are a lot of other large companies that
were thinking about how they could use
virtual reality for their users
primarily for the entertainment industry
so what that caused was a acceleration
across a large number of companies to
say Oh Facebook’s in here
they’re Greeks they’re doing their
research and development we need to get
into it too and many of you may have
seen a lot of the commercials Samsung
and some other companies of how they use
their own headsets for their
entertainment purposes in fact the
smartphone many of you have in your
pocket can be used as a headset these
days so depending on the resolution
fidelity so forth there’s lots of
options and the price point has
significantly dropped the price point
for headset this headset was $37,000 the
price point for headsets these days I’ll
show you an example here in a moment is
on the order of hundreds of dollars six
short years virtual reality has become a
reality for us now virtual reality then
two or three years ago as the headset
industry was developing was still
primarily used in the gaming industry so
think about how the typical gamer
experience goes it’s a user sitting on a
couch with a controller and they’re
staring at the TV screen and that TV
screen has their virtual character
running through the virtual environment
and they’re controlling that with the
headset or thick controller now through
the use of a headset that puts that user
inside the video game they are literally
seeing everything from a first-person
view in the early versions you still had
to control your movement with a
controller like you see here in the
picture but at least it made it a more
immersive experience you weren’t just
staring at a TV screen off in the
distance now there’s been advancements
even in the last year that have made
this even more realistic the gaming
experience no longer necessarily feels
like a game but a truly immersive
experience and that’s through technology
that has motion capture cameras small
little cubes that you can put on
opposite sides of your living room those
cubes track exactly where you are with
your headset so once you put on your
headset if
you walk forward those cubes now up he
just went forward better update that
virtual environment and it does it all
in real time what this is done is turned
your living room into the game you can
now move around in a virtual game and
more dynamically interact with some of
these characters and the controllers
that you see in the picture here are
also linked up to that virtual
environment so you as you are in virtual
reality you see your virtual hands and
those controllers even have small little
tactile sensors basically little
vibration mechanisms in them so if
there’s a little virtual dog that is
jumping around at your feet you can bend
over and pet that virtual dog your
controller will vibrate this immersive
experience has really been changed and
accelerated to make it a much more
realistic experience because of the
advancement in the entertainment and
social media industries we’re now at a
place where we can start thinking about
repurposing this technology to address
human health challenges if you think
back to the previous picture we
researchers were long thinking about
using this but the headset was too big
and too bulky too expensive the headset
you see in the pictures eight hundred
bucks down from thirty seven thousand
dollars six or short years ago it’s also
portable comes in the size of about a
briefcase so we’re no longer constrained
of just being in the laboratory we can
go to the patient we no longer have the
burden of the burden of that patient
coming to us so this opens up a whole
new world of ways that we could
virtually train people one of those ways
that we started using virtual reality to
retrain people is through showing an
avatar on a projection screen and that
avatars in a virtual environment and we
control how that avatar walks and when
the participant is walking on the
treadmill we ask them to play the same
game many of us played in kindergarten
follow the leader
so whatever that avatar does you do your
best to mimic those motions and we’ve
had stroke survivors come into the
laboratory to participate in these
experiments because stroke survivors
commonly have an asymmetrical walking
pattern one leg one leg
lags behind the other sometimes and one
of the goals of physical therapy is to
make their walking patterns more
symmetrical which helps reduce fall risk
so we control that virtual environment
we can make that avatar have an
asymmetrical walking pattern but not
quite as asymmetrical as the patient
this gives that patient a visual
prescription of what we want them to do
but also an attainable behavior that
they can slowly move their beat their
pattern their walking patterns to toured
as the patient gets better and becomes a
little bit more symmetrical then we take
that avatar and make it more symmetrical
so it’s the carrot in front of the horse
model where we’re always giving the
patient and attainable task but we
slowly bring them along to have them
walk more symmetrical this is an example
of the utility virtual reality we can
make it do whatever we want to tailor
our rehabilitation to the patient
population of interest this opens up a
world of possibilities for us to think
about precise and individualized
medicine for a variety of different
populations another way that we’ve used
virtual reality through this projection
screen system is we’ve created virtual
obstacles for the participants to step
over and these are primarily for people
who are at a higher risk of falling so
we teach them to step over these virtual
obstacles as they’re doing this training
in virtual reality now these aren’t just
virtual reality isn’t just useful in a
physical rehabilitation context but can
be used to address a wide range of human
health challenges it’s been used to
overcome phobias such as public speaking
there are companies out there that have
created mock-ups of auditoriums for
people that have a phobia of speaking
and for in public the public and then
what they do is they put on the headset
and have 200 avatar staring at you as
you walk around this is a way to
overcome that stressor it’s also been
used in other areas such as veterans who
have PTSD there’s a group that has
created virtual Iraq and it’s for
veterans that are part of an immersion
therapy program
in which they slowly get immersed back
into virtual Iraq to desensitize them to
that stressor so across a wide range of
human health challenges virtual reality
can be adopted to help address those
problems now all of those examples that
I described to you were primarily done
in the research laboratory until
recently but because we have these new
affordable and portable systems we can
now dream about getting out of the
laboratory however there’s one missing
piece here there’s one missing piece
that if we ask someone to get better at
the game and they do does that matter
and the answer that is no I don’t really
care if the patients that we’re working
with get better in the game that’s not
the end game for me the end game for our
research team is does it transfer to the
real world because if it doesn’t
transfer that change in behavior doesn’t
transfer to the real world then what are
we doing and why are we doing it so
there’s the next phase of experiments
that have been looking at this
retraining and virtual reality and then
looking at transfer to real-world
behavior in our lab and a number of
other labs have looked at this and I’m
happy to report to you that there are
studies now showing that if we retrain
you how to walk over virtual obstacles
that transfers into how you walk over
real obstacles and the real world so we
now have a system where we can retrain
behaviors in a very precise and specific
way and in a safe way so that we can
transfer it to the real world and
ultimately reduce fall risk it also
offers the opportunity to more dynamic
research projects and when we ask people
to do these more activities of daily
living so in this case going back to the
example of crossing the street this is a
game that we created called human
Frogger many of you may remember the old
arcade game called Frogger where you had
to get a frog across the street before
he got run over by a car that’s an
activity of daily living a lot of us
probably did before we walked into this
building but it’s a challenge
J activity for a number of patient
populations and so with human Frogger we
put on a helmet we put you at this
street intersection and your job is to
cross the street now if a patient has a
real challenge in walking we can make
that a single lane road with a virtual
car moving really slow but if it’s a
more advanced patient then we can make
an eight Lane superhighway and virtual
cars going all over and said good luck
okay so it gives us a really unique way
to test functional capabilities and
mobility across a variety of populations
so where do we go from here I’ve taken
you through the historical development
of this and we’re right on the precipice
of repurposing virtual reality to
address human health challenges there’s
an effort right now across the North
Carolina system all the schools in the
UNC system to link up the virtual
reality labs that all are addressing
human health challenges and these are
folks in computer science and
kinesiology and physical therapy and
biomedical engineering and others we now
have the ability to link up these labs
so we can address human health
challenges in a very unique and
synergistic way and ultimately address
human health challenges at the grandest
level in ways that we’ve never thought
about before so I ask you to consider
participating in these experiments if
you hear about them virtual reality is
no longer this futuristic tool it’s here
and the future of your health may rely
on it thank you
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