Umeå universitets logga

The increasing proliferation of Virtual Reality (VR) technology provides great potential in many industries, including healthcare, where VR has been applied for physiotherapy assessment. This research explores potentials, challenges, and user experience while taking body measurements with VR immersive technology, finding ways to retrieve body measures useful for physiotherapy VR applications. There are two major research questions that this study addresses. Specifically, how users experience eliciting 3D spatial body measurements, and additionally, what can be done and implemented to improve the accuracy of these measurements using VR without adding further devices, only head-mounted displays(HMDs) and hand controllers. To answer this, a VR application used with eight tasks was designed and tested in two prototype evaluations prior to the study. The enhanced VR application was then used to take body measurements from fourteen participants by both virtual and physical means. Users feedback was also gained by using semi-structured interviews and UEQs. Results show that user acceptance of the use of virtual techniques, and virtual measurements average accuracy was around 90% compared to physical measurements. This research contributes to the integration of VR in the elicitation of body measurements while exploring the user experience to enhance the future of VR application-based physiotherapy assessment emphasizing a user-centered design approach, along with considering ethical best practices.