WordPlay Party: Towards Collaborative XR Application Latency Guarantees for Parkinson’s Rehabilitation - Gorlatova, Duke University

Parkinson’s disease diminishes the quality of life in over 1.5 million people in the United States and 7 to 10 million people worldwide. Patients with Parkinson’s disease often face both motor and cognitive impairment and urgently need a new form of physical therapy that provides turning practice and obstacle avoidance for motor training, as well as problem-solving tasks during over-ground walking for cognitive training. Exercise games in XR have shown significant promise for physical rehabilitation in Parkinson’s disease. In this demo, we introduce WordPlay Party, which showcases innovative XR applications for rehabilitation in patients with Parkinson’s disease by enhancing user experiences in dual-task treatments that improve both motor and cognitive functions. Supported by the NSF Breaking Low project: Networked Extended Reality for Collaborative Rehabilitation (XRNet), WordPlay Party develops immersive XR exercise environments that connect geographically distributed users and enable them to move and interact with one another and with virtual elements in 3D space. A key objective is to make rehabilitation more enjoyable and effective by incorporating social interactions among remote users, which can boost engagement and skill acquisition. The technology also allows clinicians to guide and interact with their patients remotely. WordPlay Party demonstrates a comprehensive low-latency networking support framework tailored to multiplayer gameplay and advanced 5G network characteristics, including application-layer latency compensation for 3D game interactions, network-layer path selection, and an ongoing physical-layer radio resource allocation strategy.