Project Details

Description

Customer discovery program to support the development and commercialisation of a virtual-reality based treatment for phantom limb pain in amputess.

Layperson's description

The project is using games technology to help amputees to manage phantom limb pain.
Being able to visualise the movement of the missing limb is known to help patients manage the severe pain they often feel in the "phantom" limb. Traditional mirror therapy requires visualisation of a healthy limb in a mirror in order to create a visual illusion of the missing limb in the brain. Our solution uses a visualisation of the missing limb in a virtual reality game to support the management of phantom pain.
The iCURE (Innovation to Commercialisation) project involved visiting key stakeholders and potential customers in order to find out what was most important to them, so that we can design the software to suit their needs.

Key findings

We confirmed that phantom pain is a significant problem, and there is a great deal of interest in a home-based solution such as our games. We have gathered opinions from a wide range of therapists to guide the content and activities we need to include. We have also identified a number of other challenges faced by amputees which might be able to be addressed using games technology.
Short titleMirror Therapy
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date11/05/1518/12/15

Keywords

  • phantom pain
  • games
  • commercialisation
  • amputee
  • virtual reality

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