Four University of Washington students who developed a virtual reality game that provides real-time feedback for patients undergoing stroke therapy came away victorious at a neural engineering competition on Friday.
Five teams made up of UW undergrad and grad students spent the last ten weeks preparing educational demos of concepts in sensorimotor neural engineering.
A panel made up of business leaders was most impressed with Team vHAB, who created six games that stroke therapy patients could play. vHAB uses muscle activity sensors to measure and speed up motor recovery for patients, and delivers the data into electronic medical records so that doctors can measure all stages of clinical and at-home recovery.
The TechSandbox competition was put on by the UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and included students from bioengineering, mechanical engineering, neurobiology and biorobotics. Last year’s winner, a mind-controlled arm wrestling game called WrestleBrainia 3000, picked up quite a bit of worldwide attention and even demoed its product at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.