Virtual Reality as a Possible Tool for the Assessment of Self-Awareness

Abstract

The absence of self-awareness is a crucial aspect in the symptomatology of various neurodegenerative disorders. This characteristic becomes relevant due to the strong implications it has on the patient’s quality of life, on the effects that functional dependence has on the caregiver and on the efficacy of the therapy. Faced with a construct as complex as self-awareness, there are in the literature investigations on different aspects of this phenomenon, such as the creation of cognitive models, the study of the neural substrate and the research of appropriate assessment methods that can reliably detect this function. With regard to the assessment methods, there are methodologies in the literature that provide complementary information. The first modality is a quantitatively online measurement based on the discrepancy between the estimate of the patient of his performance and his actual performance, but often neglecting the ecological validity and the real functioning of the subject. The second kind collecting subjective information on the actual daily functioning of the patient resulting from clinical observation or interviews with the subject and caregivers, but obtaining offline information on the functioning of the subject, liable to bias that may imply an overestimation or underestimation of subject’s ability. The absence of acknowledged metacognitive functional assessment with normative data to evaluate awareness winks at the emerging and increasingly consistent use of virtual reality (VR) also in the context of cognitive research and clinical assessment. This article aims to make a theoretical proposal regarding the use of this innovative and promising tool as a supplement to the assessment methods of self-awareness.

Usability Issues of Clinical and Research Applications of Virtual Reality in Older People: A Systematic Review

“…The uses of VR systems in our review were mainly focused on motor rehabilitation. In healthcare, VR is mainly applied for the assessment and rehabilitation of sensorimotor, physical, and psychological deficits via non-immersive to immersive technologies (Lange et al, 2010;Bohil et al, 2011;García-Betances et al, 2015;Muratore et al, 2019;Tuena et al, 2019). We also encourage the use of pilot studies in other domains where VR is used for clinical purposes.…”

P5 eHealth: An Agenda for the Health Technologies of the Future

“…New analytical methods computed by computer, such as machine learning, prompted the "Big Data Revolution"; thus Big Data analysis in predictive medicine (Jen and Teoli 2019;Jen and Varacallo 2019), computational psychometrics (Cipresso 2015;Cipresso et al 2015;von Davier 2017) and precision medicine (Richard Leff and Yang 2015) may soon benefit from huge amount of medical information and computational techniques (Cipresso and Immekus 2017). New technologies such as virtual reality enable to extract online quantitative and computational data for each individual to deepen the study of cognitive processes (Cipresso 2015;Muratore et al 2019;Tuena et al 2019). eHealth generally is an accurate instrument in collecting data; furthermore, Big Data differ from conventional analyses in three ways according to Mayer-Schönberger and Ingelsson (Mayer-Schönberger and Ingelsson 2018): data of the phenomenon under question are extracted in a comprehensive manner; machine learning such as neural networks are preferred for statistical analyses compared to conventional methods; and finally, Big Data do not only answer to questions but generate new hypotheses.…”

Assessment of cognitive instrumental activities of daily living: a systematic review

“…However, results showed a very small number of virtual scenarios for the evaluation of executive functions in children and adolescents: only five instrumentstwo focused on kitchen tasks, one on office tasks, one on community mobility and one on attentional control in the classroom. Recent studies have started to include self-awareness as a parameter assessed with virtual reality [106]. In the future this could be of great interest for the assessment of IADLs.…”