The 1st International Workshop on eXtended Reality for Rehabilitation (XRehab)

Overview

Technologies using eXtended Reality (XR) have been increasingly applied in healthcare and rehabilitation, offering innovative solutions for physical therapy, cognitive rehabilitation, motor recovery, pain management, and mental health interventions. 

XR can enhance rehabilitation outcomes by providing immersive, engaging, and adaptive environments that support personalized therapy and real-time feedback while reducing physical and cognitive strain through interactive and motivating experiences.

This workshop — eXtended Reality for Rehabilitation (XRehab) — aims to explore the current state of XR research in rehabilitation, and discuss future research directions. XRehab will serve as a platform for collaboration between XR developers, healthcare professionals, and researchers, fostering innovation in XR-based therapeutic interventions.

The workshop will be conducted under ISMAR 2025 in a fully online format.

The challenges of developing XR solutions for cognitive and physical training improving the rehabilitation outcome and engaging patients

Abstract:

The interest in the use of Virtual, Augmented and eXtended Reality (VR/AR/XR) technologies in the context of rehabilitation is constantly increasing. However, a gap between the big advancements of such technologies in the AR/VR community and the actual use among therapists and medical doctors can be observed. 

In this talk I will present and discuss the challenges of developing effective rehabilitation solutions, which address the perceptual and interaction issues of impaired people, exploiting XR technologies and coping with the high and enormous variability of patients affected by various diseases. 

Several examples of cognitive training of young patients affected by the RETT syndrome will be used to discuss the challenges of robustly tracking people with severe physical impairments, allowing them to interact in XR. Finally, the use of XR as a digital allied to robotic platforms will be discussed, with the examples of the Fit4MedRob (Fit for Medical Robotics PNC0000007 Project), showing how XR and robotics can be effectively combined.

Bio:

Professor Manuela is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Dept. of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering of the University of Genoa. Her research interests are focused on the study of biological and artificial vision systems, on the development of bioinspired models, of natural human-machine interfaces based on virtual, augmented and mixed reality, and on the perceptual and cognitive aspects of interaction in VR, AR and XR

She focuses on study the use of novel sensing technologies and of visualization devices (e.g. 3D monitors, head-mounted-displays, mobile devices, video see-through and optical see-through) to develop natural and ecological interaction systems, always having in mind the human perception. In particular, she is active in studying misperception issues, visual stress and fatigue that arise by using such systems. Her research also focuses user expereince and the use of XR techniques to improve the life of specific categories, such as for impaired users, for rehabilitation, for cognitive and physical assessment.