Virtual Reality in Brain Damage Rehabilitation: Review

Abstract

Given the high incidence of brain injury in the population, brain damage rehabilitation is still a relatively undeveloped field. Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to assist current rehabilitation techniques in addressing the impairments, disabilities, and handicaps associated with brain damage. The main focus of much of the exploratory research performed to date has been to investigate the use of VR in the assessment of cognitive abilities, but there is now a trend for more studies to encompass rehabilitation training strategies. This review describes studies that have used VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of specific disabilities resulting from brain injury, including executive dysfunction, memory impairments, spatial ability impairments, attention deficits, and unilateral visual neglect. In addition, it describes studies that have used VR to try to offset some of the handicaps that people experience after brain injury. Finally, a table is included which, although not an exhaustive list of everything that has been published, includes many more studies that are relevant to the use of VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of brain damage. The review concludes that the use of VR in brain damage rehabilitation is expanding dramatically and will become an integral part of cognitive assessment and rehabilitation in the future.

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…VR is already widely used in studies of spatial cognition (Pine et al ., 2002) and motor control (Patton, Dawe, Scharver, Mussa‐Ivaldi, & Kenyon, 2006) and these have been reviewed elsewhere (Bohil, Alicea, & Biocca, 2011). We also focus primarily on creating VR for the purpose of psychology experiments (rather than therapy or education; Rose, Brooks, & Rizzo, 2005). Note that we use the term VR to mean ‘a computer‐generated world’ and not just ‘things viewed in a head‐mounted display’, as the term is sometimes used.…”

Validation of a low-cost virtual reality system for training street-crossing. A comparative study in healthy, neglected and non-neglected stroke individuals

“…The introduction of virtual reality (VR) to the field of neurorehabilitation has given rise to new tools for the assessment and rehabilitation of cognitive impairments that were designed to overcome the limitations of traditional tests and interventions (Rose, Brooks, & Rizzo, 2005). VR systems can recreate safe, ecological, and individualized 3D environments where patients are required to perform specific actions to achieve a goal.…”

AGATHE: A tool for personalized rehabilitation of cognitive functions based on simulated activities of daily living

“…VR provides interactive functional simulations with multimodal feedback, task graduation and review of performance thanks to various recorded data. Over the past decade, the rapid development of VR-based technologies has been both an asset and a challenge for assessment and rehabilitation [9][10][11]. VR allows the clinicians to immerse the patient in a spatial and temporal context difficult to provide via conventional therapy in order to create innovative clinical paradigms of rehabilitation.…”

“…In neuropsychology, studies were carried out to explore the potential of VR in various cases of cognitive impairment: attention [12], executive functions [8], memory [11], or visuospatial abilities. Some applications are also dedicated to activities of daily living in familiar places in order to train the patients before they come back home.…”