Abstract
Traditional ankle rehabilitation procedures are tedious, repetitive, and require therapist's help. Therefore, they do not provide patients with good motivation to actively participate in the rehabilitation exercises. In addition, objective diagnosis and evaluation of the treatment progress have been difficult because records of exercise history are made by passive instruments from time to time. The virtual reality technology can make these procedures more fun so that patients can perform everyday rehabilitation exercises more actively. Moreover, haptics technology can give active resistance to the patients ankle motion to improve strength of muscles as well as can record ankle's motion and force histories for objective diagnosis and evaluation. This paper summarizes development of a virtual environment fur reforming the conventional ankle rehabilitation procedures. First of all, conventional rehabilitation procedures have been summarized. Secondly, haptic design and control, user interface design, virtual environment contents design are described. Lastly, mutual cooperation among many developers including medical doctors and therapists and future works are commented.
