Maria Chiu was lying on her back in a Boston rehabilitation center, her knee still swollen from her fourth surgery, when she put on a VR headset and stepped—virtually—onto an alpine slope. The snowboarder and figure skater, now a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, wasn’t just recovering; she was pioneering. Confined to physical therapy routines that often felt isolating and demoralizing, Chiu turned to extended reality (XR) technology to rebuild not only her strength but her spirit. What began as personal necessity evolved into a research project at the Orthopedic Augmentation, Surgical Innovation and Interactive Systems (OASIIS) Lab, a unique collaboration between Northeastern and Massachusetts General Hospital that’s redefining what recovery can look like.
For athletes and everyday patients alike, injury rehabilitation is as much a mental battle as a physical one. Setbacks are common, motivation wanes, and progress can feel invisible. Chiu’s lived experience—11 months of rehab after a seemingly minor procedure—spurred her to design a personalized XR program that combined motion capture, real-time feedback, and immersive environments. With sensors tracking her leg movements, she could see her progress visualized in apps like FUNXION, a system developed by OASIIS Lab research scientist Nathan Miner. Each movement was measured, each improvement celebrated. “There were a lot of days that were one step forward, two steps back,” Chiu said. “The technologies that I used, they were a source of comfort for those days, and they kept me going so that I never lost too much progress, whether physically or mentally.”
She wasn’t working in isolation. Guided by orthopedic surgeons Dr. Christopher Bono and Dr. Daniel Tolbert from MGH, and Northeastern game design professor Casper Harteveld, the OASIIS Lab merges medical expertise with interactive design. Their goal? To make recovery not just tolerable, but engaging. One of their early innovations, X-DASH, replaces traditional clinical assessments with a VR simulation where patients perform everyday tasks—like opening a jar or climbing stairs—in a virtual kitchen or living room. This allows doctors to gather objective, real-time data instead of relying solely on subjective patient reports.
The implications extend far beyond snowboarders and athletes. As wearable tech like smartwatches normalize health tracking, XR offers a new frontier in patient agency. “You're not just waiting at home for your next physical therapy exercise,” Harteveld said. “You feel like you're actively participating in the process.” For Chiu, that sense of control made all the difference. Today, she’s back on the ice, not just as a skater, but as a researcher helping others navigate their own comebacks. The lab continues to refine its tools, aiming to bring immersive rehab into mainstream care—one virtual step at a time.