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Abstract Background Illusion of movement induced by tendon vibration is commonly used in rehabilitation and seems valuable for motor rehabilitation after stroke, by playing a role in cerebral plasticity. The aim was to study if congruent visual cues using Virtual Reality (VR) could enhance the illusion of movement induced by tendon vibration of the wrist among participants with stroke. Methods We included 20 chronic stroke participants. They experienced tendon vibration of their wrist (100 Hz, 30 times) inducing illusion of movement. Three VR visual conditions were added to the vibration: a congruent moving virtual hand (Moving condition); a static virtual hand (Static condition); or no virtual hand at all (Hidden condition). The participants evaluated for each visual condition the intensity of the illusory movement using a Likert scale, the sensation of wrist’s movement using a degree scale and they answered a questionnaire about their preferred condition. Results The Moving condition was significantly superior to the Hidden condition and to the Static condition in terms of illusion of movement (p

Encountered-Type Haptic Displays (ETHDs) enable users to touch virtual surfaces by using robotic actuators capable of co-locating real and virtual surfaces without encumbering users with actuators. One of the main challenges of ETHDs is to ensure that the robotic actuators do not interfere with the VR experience by avoiding unexpected collisions with users. This paper presents a design space for safety techniques using visual feedback to make users aware of the robot’s state and thus reduce unintended potential collisions. The blocks that compose this design space focus on what and when the feedback is displayed and how it protects the user. Using this design space, a set of 18 techniques was developed exploring variations of the three dimensions. An evaluation questionnaire focusing on immersion and perceived safety was designed and evaluated by a group of experts, which was used to provide a first assessment of the proposed techniques.

Stroke is a severe health issue, and motor recovery after stroke remains an important challenge in the rehabilitation field. Neurofeedback (NFB), as part of a brain–computer interface, is a technique for modulating brain activity using on-line feedback that has proved to be useful in motor rehabilitation for the chronic stroke population in addition to traditional therapies. Nevertheless, its use and applications in the field still leave unresolved questions. The brain pathophysiological mechanisms after stroke remain partly unknown, and the possibilities for intervention on these mechanisms to promote cerebral plasticity are limited in clinical practice. In NFB motor rehabilitation, the aim is to adapt the therapy to the patient’s clinical context using brain imaging, considering the time after stroke, the localization of brain lesions, and their clinical impact, while taking into account currently used biomarkers and technical limitations. These modern techniques also allow a better understanding of the physiopathology and neuroplasticity of the brain after stroke. We conducted a narrative literature review of studies using NFB for post-stroke motor rehabilitation. The main goal was to decompose all the elements that can be modified in NFB therapies, which can lead to their adaptation according to the patient’s context and according to the current technological limits. Adaptation and individualization of care could derive from this analysis to better meet the patients’ needs. We focused on and highlighted the various clinical and technological components considering the most recent experiments. The second goal was to propose general recommendations and enhance the limits and perspectives to improve our general knowledge in the field and allow clinical applications. We highlighted the multidisciplinary approach of this work by combining engineering abilities and medical experience. Engineering development is essential for the available technological tools and aims to increase neuroscience knowledge in the NFB topic. This technological development was born out of the real clinical need to provide complementary therapeutic solutions to a public health problem, considering the actual clinical context of the post-stroke patient and the practical limits resulting from it.

The sensation of self-motion is essential in many virtual reality applications, from entertainment to training, such as flying and driving simulators. If the common approach used in amusement parks is to actuate the seats with cumbersome systems, multisensory integration can also be leveraged to get rich effects from lightweight solutions. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called the “Kinesthetic HMD”: actuating a head-mounted display with force feedback in order to provide sensations of self-motion. We discuss its design considerations and demonstrate an augmented flight simulator use case with a proof-of-concept prototype. We conducted a user study assessing our approach’s ability to enhance self-motion sensations. Taken together, our results show that our Kinesthetic HMD provides significantly stronger and more egocentric sensations than a visual-only self-motion experience. Thus, by providing congruent vestibular and proprioceptive cues related to balance and self-motion, the Kinesthetic HMD represents a promising approach for a variety of virtual reality applications in which motion sensations are prominent.

This paper studies the sense of embodiment of virtual avatars in Mixed Reality (MR) environments visualized with an Optical See-Through display. We investigated whether the content of the surrounding environment could impact the user’s perception of their avatar, when embodied from a first-person perspective. To do so, we conducted a user study comparing the sense of embodiment toward virtual robot hands in three environment contexts which included progressive quantities of virtual content: real content only, mixed virtual/real content, and virtual content only. Taken together, our results suggest that users tend to accept virtual hands as their own more easily when the environment contains both virtual and real objects (mixed context), allowing them to better merge the two “worlds”. We discuss these results and raise research questions for future work to consider.

The role of haptic feedback on virtual embodiment is investigated in this paper in a context of active and fine manipulation. In particular, we explore which haptic cue, with varying ecological validity, has more influence on virtual embodiment. We conducted a within-subject experiment with 24 participants and compared self-reported embodiment over a humanoid avatar during a coloring task under three conditions: force feedback, vibrotactile feedback, and no haptic feedback. In the experiment, force feedback was more ecological as it matched reality more closely, while vibrotactile feedback was more symbolic. Taken together, our results show significant superiority of force feedback over no haptic feedback regarding embodiment, and significant superiority of force feedback over the other two conditions regarding subjective performance. Those results suggest that a more ecological feedback is better suited to elicit embodiment during fine manipulation tasks.

IntroductionMotor Imagery (MI) is a powerful tool to stimulate sensorimotor brain areas and is currently used in motor rehabilitation after a stroke. The aim of our study was to evaluate whether an illusion of movement induced by visuo-proprioceptive immersion (VPI) including tendon vibration (TV) and Virtual moving hand (VR) combined with MI tasks could be more efficient than VPI alone or MI alone on cortical excitability assessed using Electroencephalography (EEG).MethodsWe recorded EEG signals in 20 healthy participants in 3 different conditions: MI tasks involving their non-dominant wrist (MI condition); VPI condition; and VPI with MI tasks (combined condition). Each condition lasted 3 minutes, and was repeated 3 times in randomized order. Our main judgment criterion was the Event-Related De-synchronization (ERD) threshold in sensori-motor areas in each condition in the brain motor area.ResultsThe combined condition induced a greater change in the ERD percentage than the MI condition alone, but no significant difference was found between the combined and the VPI condition (p = 0.07) and between the VPI and MI condition (p = 0.20).ConclusionThis study demonstrated the interest of using a visuo-proprioceptive immersion with MI rather than MI alone in order to increase excitability in motor areas of the brain. Further studies could test this hypothesis among patients with stroke to provide new perspectives for motor rehabilitation in this population.

Neurofeedback (NF) and brain-computer interface (BCI) applications rely on the registration and real-time feedback of individual patterns of brain activity with the aim of achieving self-regulation of specific neural substrates or control of external devices. These approaches have historically employed visual stimuli. However, in some cases vision is unsuitable or inadequately engaging. Other sensory modalities, such as auditory or haptic feedback have been explored, and multisensory stimulation is expected to improve the quality of the interaction loop. Moreover, for motor imagery tasks, closing the sensorimotor loop through haptic feedback may be relevant for motor rehabilitation applications, as it can promote plasticity mechanisms. This survey reviews the various haptic technologies and describes their application to BCIs and NF. We identify major trends in the use of haptic interfaces for BCI and NF systems and discuss crucial aspects that could motivate further studies.

Traditional rehabilitation techniques present limitations and the majority of patients show poor 1-year post-stroke recovery. Thus, Neurofeedback (NF) or Brain-Computer-Interface applications for stroke rehabilitation purposes are gaining increased attention. Indeed, NF has the potential to enhance volitional control of targeted cortical areas and thus impact on motor function recovery. However, current implementations are limited by temporal, spatial or practical constraints of the specific imaging modality used. In this pilot work and for the first time in literature, we applied bimodal EEG-fMRI NF for upper limb stroke recovery on four stroke-patients with different stroke characteristics and motor impairment severity. We also propose a novel, multi-target training approach that guides the training towards the activation of the ipsilesional primary motor cortex. In addition to fMRI and EEG outcomes, we assess the integrity of the corticospinal tract (CST) with tractography. Preliminary results suggest the feasibility of our approach and show its potential to induce an augmented activation of ipsilesional motor areas, depending on the severity of the stroke deficit. Only the two patients with a preserved CST and subcortical lesions succeeded in upregulating the ipsilesional primary motor cortex and exhibited a functional improvement of upper limb motricity. These findings highlight the importance of taking into account the variability of the stroke patients’ population and enabled to identify inclusion criteria for the design of future clinical studies.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have become more and more popular these last years. Researchers use this technology for several types of applications, including attention and workload measures but also for the direct control of objects by the means of BCIs. In this work we present a first, multidimensional feature space for EEG-based BCI applications to help practitioners to characterize, compare and design systems, which use EEG-based BCIs. Our feature space contains 4 axes and 9 sub-axes and consists of 41 options in total as well as their different combinations. We presented the axes of our feature space and we positioned our feature space regarding the existing BCI and HCI taxonomies and we showed how our work integrates the past works, and/or complements them.

In this paper we introduce MoSART, a novel approach for Mobile Spatial Augmented Reality on Tangible objects. MoSART is dedicated to mobile interaction with tangible objects in single or collaborative situations. It is based on a novel “all-in-one” Head-Mounted Display (AMD) including a projector (for the SAR display) and cameras (for the scene registration). Equipped with the HMD the user is able to move freely around tangible objects and manipulate them at will. The system tracks the position and orientation of the tangible 3D objects and projects virtual content over them. The tracking is a feature-based stereo optical tracking providing high accuracy and low latency. A projection mapping technique is used for the projection on the tangible objects which can have a complex 3D geometry. Several interaction tools have also been designed to interact with the tangible and augmented content, such as a control panel and a pointer metaphor, which can benefit as well from the MoSART projection mapping and tracking features. The possibilities offered by our novel approach are illustrated in several use cases, in single or collaborative situations, such as for virtual prototyping, training or medical visualization.

Competition changes the environment for athletes. The difficulty of training for such stressful events can lead to the well-known effect of “choking” under pressure, which prevents athletes from performing at their best level. To study the effect of competition on the human brain, we recorded pilot electroencephalography (EEG) data while novice shooters were immersed in a realistic virtual environment representing a shooting range. We found a differential between-subject effect of competition on mu (8–12 Hz) oscillatory activity during aiming; compared to training, the more the subject was able to desynchronize his mu rhythm during competition, the better was his shooting performance. Because this differential effect could not be explained by differences in simple measures of the kinematics and muscular activity, nor by the effect of competition or shooting performance per se, we interpret our results as evidence that mu desynchronization has a positive effect on performance during competition.

Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) community has focused the majority of its research efforts on signal processing and machine learning, mostly neglecting the human in the loop. Guiding users on how to use a BCI is crucial in order to teach them to produce stable brain patterns. In this work, we explore the instructions and feedback for BCIs in order to provide a systematic taxonomy to describe the BCI guiding systems. The purpose of our work is to give necessary clues to the researchers and designers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) in making the fusion between BCIs and HCI more fruitful but also to better understand the possibilities BCIs can provide to them.

Neurofeedback is a promising tool for brain rehabilitation and peak performance training. Neurofeedback approaches usually rely on a single brain imaging modality such as EEG or fMRI. Combining these modalities for neurofeedback training could allow to provide richer information to the subject and could thus enable him/her to achieve faster and more specific self-regulation. Yet unimodal and multimodal neurofeedback have never been compared before. In the present work, we introduce a simultaneous EEG-fMRI experimental protocol in which participants performed a motor-imagery task in unimodal and bimodal NF conditions. With this protocol we were able to compare for the first time the effects of unimodal EEG-neurofeedback and fMRI-neurofeedback versus bimodal EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback by looking both at EEG and fMRI activations. We also propose a new feedback metaphor for bimodal EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback that integrates both EEG and fMRI signal in a single bi-dimensional feedback (a ball moving in 2D). Such a feedback is intended to relieve the cognitive load of the subject by presenting the bimodal neurofeedback task as a single regulation task instead of two. Additionally, this integrated feedback metaphor gives flexibility on defining a bimodal neurofeedback target. Participants were able to regulate activity in their motor regions in all NF conditions. Moreover, motor activations as revealed by offline fMRI analysis were stronger during EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback than during EEG-neurofeedback. This result suggests that EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback could be more specific or more engaging than EEG-neurofeedback. Our results also suggest that during EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback, participants tended to regulate more the modality that was harder to control. Taken together our results shed first light on the specific mechanisms of bimodal EEG-fMRI-neurofeedback and on its added-value as compared to unimodal EEG-neurofeedback and fMRI-neurofeedback.