Masterpeace VR wears many hats, but it is a virtual rehabilitation experience aimed towards helping patients who have suffered a stroke.
This program can assist patients recovering long-term, to patients that just suffered a stroke right out of urgent care — the most important time of all to give this experience a try. (Keep reading below to find out why!)
Understanding the Problem
To create an experience that is set out to change the world, we need as a team to understand the concept of what we’re doing and why we need to do it. There are lots of people in our lives that have had strokes. I recently had a family member who is very close to me encounter such an experience, and it was a very scary time. With limited knowledge on the subject at the time, I had no idea what would come of it as a result. After talking with my family member about it, a lot of the rehabilitation is extremely rustic in our current time, and this family member mentioned they didn’t want to go back, as it was incredibly long, tiresome, and boring. The methods of stroke rehabilitation can be broken into three pieces, as described by Dr. Ross, Md:
Speech Therapy | Physical Therapy | Occupational Therapy
These methods are practiced separately with patients in order to reform to their pre-stroke selves. With today’s methods, stroke rehabilitation provides the following, as explained by Northwestern University:
10% of patients recover almost completely.
25% of patients recover with only minor impairments.
40% of patients experience moderate-to-severe impairments that require special care.
10% of patients require long-term care.
15% of patients die shortly after.
My team and I broke down these statistics and we studied what happens at therapy rehabilitation centers. And it turns out — VR does all of what is offered in centers today — and most importantly, it makes rehabilitation a beautiful and interesting experience. But, creating this experience would not have the goal of serving as an individual product, that could potentially remove jobs from therapists — in fact, this experience is far from it. This application is built from the ground up for therapists to look at statistics, and monitor how the patient is improving.
And that leads to the reason I want to do this project — the purpose of creating this in the first place. One of my biggest goals is to be able to give this to my family member, to have them try it out and tell me how effective it is, and if it would be helpful to them. They still struggle to walk but are very slowly improving and I’m hopeful this could benefit the way my family member lives life.
I have an incredibly strong feeling we as a team can revolutionize the way strokes are managed. It’s a treacherous journey to make an application like this, however. Only one application for stroke patients has been made in history, and the reasoning became very evident as we continued to research. Strokes have a big variation of symptoms — but my team and I think we’ve found the recipe.
The Marvelous Journey of Masterpeace
Backing with Professionals
In the beginning, our team had pieces of ideas, with a clear determination for making something that hasn’t been done before. This took a lot of conceptual ideation, but, most of all, we wanted to get research on certain problems in the medical industry, since we were set on doing something in the medical field with virtual reality. I was very fortunate to speak to Dr. Ross about some possible issues in the medical industry that were ongoing, and showed her a previous project I’ve worked on called Shroom Slayer VR. The immersion quickly got her attention and suggested the idea of doing speech therapy for patients with strokes and alzheimer’s. I brought what she said to the team and they loved it equally as much as I did. It was awesome.
This one idea kept coming back — the idea of having a central area the player of our experience starts in. This would be called the Plaza. A place for the user to start in, and since there is a lot of stimulation going on immediately when a stroke patient enters a headset, we want there to be a relaxing, yet encouraging environment, geared primarily toward the current health situation of the patient. One idea we had was to have three portals, each of which represent a different painting. We’ve decided Starry Night, Dogs Playing Poker, and last but not least, The Bedroom. Our teammate Belize sent out a phenomenal survey, getting approximately 70 responses about which painting they would like to see as an immersive environment. And out of about 10 different paintings, Starry Night and Dogs Playing Poker had wide acceptance in the survey. During this time, I was establishing a way to view our project in the headset, along with a brand new way of using the player in Unity as a game controller, so we can apply things like gravity to the user and other effects much more easily.
We began tailoring our research to stroke patients. We as a team spoke with Dr. Benton on the idea of doing a VR experience for stroke patients. We kept in mind everything she said, as she has worked with VR in the past in the medical field, and understands these concepts very well. During this time, we were also trying to think of ways to improve the therapy experience through all means of stroke rehabilitation. We decided to expand our goals and make them extremely big, fitting to a tight schedule to get the best product we can out there. 3 separate experiences. One experience for speech therapy, one experience for physical therapy, and one experience for occupational therapy. From our initial ideation stage in the very beginning of our team’s origins, we took some older ideas and tailored them to our current projects’ goals, such as famous paintings. We discussed different options to do for these 3 separate experiences, and we collected survey data asking people what they would like to see in a virtual environment.
We began tailoring our research to stroke patients. We as a team spoke with Dr. Benton on the idea of doing a VR experience for stroke patients. We kept in mind everything she said, as she has worked with VR in the past in the medical field, and understands these concepts very well. During this time, we were also trying to think of ways to improve the therapy experience through all means of stroke rehabilitation. We decided to expand our goals and make them extremely big, fitting to a tight schedule to get the best product we can out there. 3 separate experiences. One experience for speech therapy, one experience for physical therapy, and one experience for occupational therapy. From our initial ideation stage in the very beginning of our team’s origins, we took some older ideas and tailored them to our current projects’ goals, such as famous paintings. We discussed different options to do for these 3 separate experiences, and we collected survey data asking people what they would like to see in a virtual environment.