PAN Assistant, 2022–2025

Therapies to restore the cognitive abilities of brain damage patients are very time-consuming and labour-intensive. Also, victims of strokes and traumatic brain injuries frequently complain of disorientation. They normally undergo a therapy involving repetitive exercises with one-on-one supervision. To aid patient rehabilitation, ART+COM developed a range of software tools in a joint project with the P.A.N. Centre for Post-Acute Neurorehabilitation in Berlin, the Department of Neurology at Berlin’s Charité hospital, the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and Technology (BHT) and software firm Ascora. The solutions enable virtual route and orientation training that is safe and tailored to individual needs.

We drew on virtual reality and augmented reality for the project with the aim of making patients more independent and boosting participation. This represents a new approach to treatment that enhances and builds on common practices. The resulting digital training app gained a high level of acceptance among patients as they were closely involved throughout the development process.

The PAN Assistant project sees ART+COM deepen its expertise in software design for users with specific needs. The experience gained in previous medical research projects, such as bewARe and TheraTex, was crucial to our work on PAN Assistant, as was our user-centred and iterative design approach. The basic principles of this future technology could also be adopted in other areas of neurorehabilitation and flow into upcoming ART+COM projects.

PAN Assistant was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.