The first step is to connect the Wii Balance Board via Windows' regular "Add Bluetooth Device" tool. You click the red sync button inside the balance board's battery housing and then Add Bluetooth Device in Windows. Sometimes the device shows up as "Nintendo WBC-01", and sometimes only as a generic input device. In any case, click on it and then click "Add Without Using a Pin Code". This will allow you to sync with the device.

Once it is synced, you can start the Wiihab program and it will automatically connect with the balance board. If you opened the program before the balance board was synced, you can click "Reconnect Controllers" to try to find a connected balance board.

This program is divided into a few main parts. First, the patient list loads in patients from a text file. You can edit patients in the patient info area. Each patient has a list of encounters, which represent a given test or appointment.

There are two possible ways to view the Wii Balance Board data, a patient view and a therapist view. This allows the therapists to potentially see more complex representations of the data than the patient sees, such as actual numeric weight values.

There are various options for how the data is displayed to the user. When you open the patient view window by clicking the check box, it simply displays the center of gravity on a blank canvas. Then, you can select from a list of available views to see other information. For example, a simple crosshairs control can be displayed. As you can see, the appearance of the center of gravity dot can be changed on a per control basis; this is configured by an ini file outside of the program.

The same options are available for the therapist view, but you can select a different view if you'd like. For example, the "Crosshairs With Corners" control has a lot more information that would be more useful to the therapist, but would only be distracting to the patient. This system will work best with a multiple monitor setup, where the patient will see only the Patient View on a large monitor, but the therapist sees the main window and therapist view on a different monitor.

You can also do more complex views. For example, this airplane view does not display the center of gravity, but represent horizontal skew as the angle of the airplane and vertical skew as the height of the horizon.

Another major feature is targeting. You can define a targeting script outside of the program that gets loaded and plays when the start target sequence button is pressed. You can see here how the target is displayed. A lot of aspects of the targets can be configured, such as the time required to hold, the color, and the size.

That's about it for the Wii-based Stroke Rehab software. Thanks!

-- MichaelOlson - 27 Apr 2010