The November 2025 issue of Duke I/O Magazine includes an article titled “Transforming Reality: How Gaming Gear is Impacting Health Care,” featuring a lovely summary of our ongoing collaboration with the Duke University School of Nursing. Together, we are designing XR rehabilitation platforms for patients receiving long-term care in the ICU.
Excerpt from the Duke I/O article describing our joint work with DUSON
This has been a somewhat unusual project for my group: its core contribution is not the development of new technology, but rather moving technology into practice. A key part of this work is creating XR experiences that benefit patients; this requires understanding the stages of mobility progression that physical therapists want to support, while also ensuring that the system is straightforward for nurses to set up and use.
It has been a truly transdisciplinary effort, with physical therapists, nurses, game designers, engineers, patients, and caregivers all providing input on how the system should work. I am very proud of the entire team for continuing to push this important work forward. Great thanks to the National Science Foundation for funding our work.
Related publications:
- Rhythms of Recovery: Patient-Centered Virtual Reality Exergame for Physical Rehabilitation in the Intensive Care Unit: an IEEE TVCG 2026 paper, to be presented at IEEE VR 2026 and available on arXiv.
- Human-Centered Design of a Virtual Reality Intervention to Promote Early Mobility in a Cardiothoracic ICU: published in CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing and available on PubMed.