As life expectancy is mostly increasing, the incidence of many neurological disorders is also constantly growing. For improving the physical functions affected by a neurological disorder, rehabilitation procedures are mandatory, and they must be performed regularly. Unfortunately, neurorehabilitation procedures have disadvantages in terms of costs, accessibility and a lack of therapists. This paper presents Immersive Neurorehabilitation Exercises Using Virtual Reality (INREX-VR), our innovative immersive neurorehabilitation system using virtual reality. The system is based on a thorough research methodology and is able to capture real-time user movements and evaluate joint mobility for both upper and lower limbs, record training sessions and save electromyography data. The use of the first-person perspective increases immersion, and the joint range of motion is calculated with the help of both the HTC Vive system and inverse kinematics principles applied on skeleton rigs. Tutorial exercises are demonstrated by a virtual therapist, as they were recorded with real-life physicians, and sessions can be monitored and configured through tele-medicine. Complex movements are practiced in gamified settings, encouraging self-improvement and competition. Finally, we proposed a training plan and preliminary tests which show promising results in terms of accuracy and user feedback. As future developments, we plan to improve the system’s accuracy and investigate a wireless alternative based on neural networks.

This paper presents an innovative use case of virtual reality (VR) for career development and exploration, within the context of the CareProfSys recommendation system for professions. The recommender users receive recommendations not only in textual format but as WebVR gamified scenarios as well, having thus the possibility to try activities specific to the suggested professions and decide whether they are suitable for them or not. This paper describes, from a functional and technical point of view, scenarios for six different jobs: computer network specialists, civil engineers, web and multimedia developers, chemical engineers, project managers, and university professors. Extended experiments were performed, using an internal protocol, with 47 students enrolled in engineering studies. The results of the experiments were measured with the aid of four instruments: two questionnaires, one unstructured interview, and the VR simulation performance recording module. Positive results were obtained: the users admitted that such a tool was useful when choosing one’s career and that it was entertaining. Most of the students considered the VR scenarios as learning or testing experiences, too. Thus, we claim that a VR form of providing job recommendations is more appealing to young people and brings value to career development initiatives.

Professionalization of work represents the process of transforming an occupation into a profession with a high degree of integrity and competence, requiring the existence of professional qualification frameworks, standards, and nomenclatures to describe the necessary skills, abilities, and education for an individual to have a fruitful career. The current study provides details on professions from the engineering domain that are modeled using a prototype ontology tailored to the context of Industry 4.0 in the Romanian landscape. Our ontology represents the foundations for providing personalized recommendations to find suitable professions in the Romanian job market while illustrating the importance of AI tools to support career development.

The worldwide increase in the number of disorders requiring rehabilitation is weighing more and more on healthcare systems, seriously affecting the quality of life of patients. Emergent technologies and techniques should be used more and more in both physical and psychological rehabilitation, after a thorough study of their potential and effects. Our paper presents an original virtual reality-based system including gamified immersive physio-psychological exercises, which was tested in a clinical setting with 25 patients suffering from various musculoskeletal, neuromotor, or mental disorders. A thorough testing protocol was followed during a two-week period, including repeated trials, progress tracking, and objective and subjective instruments used for data collection. A statistical analysis helped us identify interesting correlations between complex virtual reality games and people’s performance, and the high level of relaxation and stress relief (4.57 out of 5 across all games) which can be offered by VR-based psychotherapy exercises, as well as the increased ease of use (4.26 out of 5 perceived across all games) of properly designed training exercises regardless of patients’ level of VR experience (84% of patients with no or low experience and no patient with high experience).

Maybe you heard the line “managing programmers is like herding cats”, and if you consider there is some truth behind this, then you should, perhaps, think how it is to teach people to perform this job. As we know from the research literature, there is no such thing as a consensus about the most suitable teaching method of a software project management course targeted to information technology students. Moreover, the majority of publications focus on the theoretical aspects of the course, thus leaving little details about the application of the theory, or how to experience the practical side. The paper at hand proposes an abstract model of educational approaches, suggestively named MOSAICS, which may be used in teaching the practical side of a software project management course.