Virtual Reality Supported Neck Stretching Exercises to Improve Cervical Range of Motion

Neck pain is a musculoskeletal disorder that often occurs in office workers with sedentary lifestyles. Stretching exercises have been proposed to prevent and treat neck pain.In this paper, we describe a custom-made virtual reality game, "Fly with the Owl," that encourages office workers to participate in stretching exercises by prompting them with different visual cues in virtual reality. We assessed the effect of a single game session on the user's cervical range of motion and intrinsic motivation in 40 healthy adult participants (18 female, average age 28 years). The game significantly increased the range of motion for lateral flexion to the right(pre: 39.36° (SD: 9.10°), post: 45.05° (SD:13.07°)), lateral flexion to the left (pre: 40.44° (SD: 10.14°), post: 44.35° (SD: 12.00°)), and rotation to the right (pre: 53.62° (SD: 14.51° ), post: 60.16° (SD: 13.08°)). The changes in the range of motion for rotation to the left, flexion, and extension were not significant. On the intrinsic motivation inventory, the participants scored the experience with high values in the enjoyment dimension and low values in the pressure dimension. Our results show that our participants were motivated and able to increase their cervical range of motion by using our VR game.