THRIVE: Therapeutic Humanoid Robot In Virtual Environment
Jin Xu, Yu-Ping Chen, Ayanna Howard · N/A · 2026
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Summary
This paper presents THRIVE (Therapeutic Humanoid Robot In Virtual Environment), an at-home rehabilitation platform that integrates a suite of virtual-reality upper-body rehabilitation games, a real-time camera-based motion-tracking system, and a socially interactive robot therapist.
Abstract Summary
Key Points
- This paper presents THRIVE (Therapeutic Humanoid Robot In Virtual Environment), an at-home rehabilitation platform that integrates a suite of virtual-reality upper-body rehabilitation games, a real-time camera-based motion-tracking system, and a socially interactive robot therapist.
- The system is designed for therapy and intervention in children with upper-limb motor impairments, which can be improved through consistent, task-specific practice.
- THRIVE features a set of newly designed, engaging games that target functional reaching, grasping, and object-manipulation movements through customizable popping, hitting, catching, and grabbing tasks, while the camera-based tracking system captures the child's kinematic performance during play.
- A robot therapist - deployable either as a physical robotic coach or as a remote-presence virtual agent - delivers adaptive, dynamic feedback to motivate the child and guide their movements toward therapeutic goals.
- THRIVE decouples the therapeutic games from the robot embodiment, extending the platform to support various embodiments and different robots within one modular system.
Methodology
The THRIVE system consists of two major components: rehabilitation games and the THRIVE robot, which plays the role of an AI therapist and can be embodied as a physical robot, a remote-presence robot, or a virtual agent. Figure 1 shows the overall system architecture of the THRIVE system.
The THRIVE system comes with a suite of four newly developed games based on the original SuperPop games [ García-Vergara et al., 2013 ] . When playing these games, the child is immersed in a virtual world containing various virtual objects.
Sources and Demonstrations
Figures are reproduced from Xu et al. See the full paper for experimental details and the project page, when the paper links one, for demonstrations and videos.
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