Virtual reality on neuropsychological disorders

BACKGROUND: Limb apraxia is an acquired cognitive-motor disorder characterized by spatial and temporal disorganization of limb movements, negatively affecting the quality of life of patients, including those with multiple sclerosis (MS). Although recent studies have shown the potential role of VR in increasing cognitive and motor functions, only a few studies have been carried out on the rehabilitation of upper limb apraxia. Hence, our study aims to evaluate the potential efficacy of VR training to improve upper limb ideomotor apraxia in patients with MS...

One evidence-based treatment for spatial neglect is prism adaptation (PA) treatment. PA after-effects, i.e., the implicit shifts in the arm reaching position toward the neglected side of space after prism removal, are considered fundamental to PA treatment effects. In the present study, the arm reaching position was shifted through a visuomotor misalignment procedure using immersive virtual reality (VR). To examine whether this procedure might have a beneficial impact on spatial neglect, we conducted a multi-baseline experiment in three individuals with chronic left-sided neglect post stroke...

Background: Aspects of cognitive function decline with age. This phenomenon is referred to as age-related cognitive decline (ARCD). Improving the understanding of these changes that occur as part of the ageing process can serve to enhance the detection of the more incapacitating neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we employ novel methods to assess ARCD by exploring the utility of the alpha3/alpha2 electroencephalogram (EEG) power ratio - a marker of AD, and a novel virtual reality (VR) functional cognition task - VStore, in discriminating between young and ageing healthy adults...

BACKGROUND: Bipolar disorders (BD) is a common, chronic and disabling psychiatric condition. In addition to being characterized by significant clinical heterogeneity, notable disturbances of sleep and cognitive function are frequently observed in all phases of the disease. Currently, there is no readily available biomarker in current clinical practice to help diagnose or predict the disease course. Thus, identification of biomarkers in BD is today a major challenge. In this context, the study of electrophysiological biomarkers based on electroretinogram (ERG) measurements in BD seems highly promising...

Motor learning enables preschoolers and children to acquire fundamental skills that are critical to their development. The current study sought to conduct a bibliometric and visualization analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of motor-learning progress in preschoolers and children over the previous 15 years. The number of studies is constantly growing, with the United States and Australia, as well as other productive institutions and authors, at the leading edge. The dominant disciplines were Neurosciences and Neurology, Psychology, Rehabilitation, and Sport Sciences...

This systematic review aimed to present the comparison of the impacts of conventional exercise and virtual reality (VR) exergaming on the physical and cognitive abilities of people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS). The literature search was conducted in the EMBASE, PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library databases. Eligible studies were identified by independent reviewers based on the title, abstract and full-texts. Studies were limited to randomized clinical trials published in peer-reviewed journals in English that compared conventional exercise with VR-exergaming for improving the physical and cognitive abilities of PwMS...

New technologies such as multitouch-multiuser tabletops (MMT) and virtual reality (VR) provide modern neurorehabilitation options. The aim was to describe the structure of acquired social communication deficits in children with neurological disorders (ND) and implement a new PowerVR method- combined MMT/VR interfaces, into social neurorehabilitation. The study was designed based on the Structured Social Rehabilitation Model. Sixty children with ND aged 8-13 years participated: 28 with epilepsy, 10 with traumatic brain injury (TBI), 3 with tic disorders, 3 with stroke, 16 with other ND...

Introduction: Executive dysfunctions constitute a significant public health problem: their high impact on everyday life makes it a priority to identify early strategies for evaluating and rehabilitating these disorders in a real-life context. The ecological limitation of traditional neuropsychological tests and several difficulties in administering tests or training in real-life scenarios have paved the way to use Virtual Reality-based tools to evaluate and rehabilitate Executive Functions (EFs) in real-life...

Metals-especially iron, copper and manganese-are important elements of brain functions and development. Metal-dysregulation homeostasis is associated with brain-structure damage to the motor, cognitive and emotional systems, and leads to neurodegenerative processes. There is more and more evidence that specialized cognitive and motor exercises can enhance brain function and attenuate neurodegeneration in mechanisms, such as improving neuroplasticity by altering the synaptic structure and function in many brain regions...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive deficits are present in several neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer disease, schizophrenia, and depression. Assessments used to measure cognition in these disorders are time-consuming, burdensome, and have low ecological validity. To address these limitations, we developed a novel virtual reality shopping task-VStore. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to establish the construct validity of VStore in relation to the established computerized cognitive battery, Cogstate, and explore its sensitivity to age-related cognitive decline...

Here, we developed a method that randomly generates balloons in the left-right, up-down, and near-far spaces on a monitor using a head-mounted display. In this study, we evaluated a lack of stimulus-driven attention case that was undetected by conventional assessments such as the Behavioral Inattention Test. We could identify mild neglect with our virtual reality method, as later confirmed using the Catherine Bergego scale. After repeated practice under a tilted background space condition, the patient demonstrated a reduction in the time needed to perceive the appearing balloons, suggesting a therapeutic effect...

There is a pressing need for measures of real-life cognitive functioning in patients with mood or psychotic disorders in clinical settings and treatment trials targeting cognition. We developed the first immersive virtual reality cognition assessment tool, the Cognition Assessment in Virtual Reality (CAVIR), which assesses verbal memory, processing speed, attention, working memory and planning skills in an interactive virtual reality kitchen scenario. This study investigates the sensitivity and validity of the CAVIR for cognitive impairments in mood and psychotic disorders and its association with functioning and neuropsychological performance...

Studies on prospective memory (PM) predominantly assess either event- or time-based PM by implementing non-ecological laboratory-based tasks. The results deriving from these paradigms have provided findings that are discrepant with ecologically valid research paradigms that converge on the complexity and cognitive demands of everyday tasks. The Virtual Reality Everyday Assessment Lab (VR-EAL), an immersive virtual reality (VR) neuropsychological battery with enhanced ecological validity, was implemented to assess everyday event- and time-based PM, as well as the influence of other cognitive functions on everyday PM functioning...

BACKGROUND: In neuropsychology, fully immersive virtual reality (VR) has been spotlighted as a promising tool. It is considered that VR not only overcomes the existing limitation of neuropsychological tests but is also appropriate for treating executive functions (EFs) within activities of daily living (ADL) due to its high ecological validity. While fully immersive VR offers new possibilities of neuropsychological tests, there are few studies that overview the intellectual landscape and academic trends in the research related to mainly targeted EFs with fully immersive VR...

Prospective Memory (PM), the ability to remember to carry out intentions in the future, is often impaired after stroke. Little is known about rehabilitation of PM post-stroke with literature limited by small sample sizes and reliance on self-reported memory performance. Implementation intentions may make prospective remembering more automatic and follow a simple if-then structure (if X occurs, then I will do Y), focusing on the cue rather than the task. We aimed to investigate the effect of implementation intentions on PM post-stroke...

BACKGROUND: Immersive technologies like virtual reality can enable clinical care that meaningfully aligns with real-world deficits in cognitive functioning. However, options in immersive 3D environments are limited, partly because of the unique challenges presented by the development of a clinical care platform. These challenges include selecting clinically relevant features, enabling tasks that capture the full breadth of deficits, ensuring longevity in a rapidly changing technology landscape, and performing the extensive technical and clinical validation required for digital interventions...

Depersonalization is a dissociative disorder associated to a profound disruption of self-awareness in the form of emotional numbing and feelings of disembodiment. The salient feature of depersonalization is a breakdown in the familiarity of one's psychological and somatic self (and surroundings when derealization is also present), in spite of being aware of the unreality of the change. At an early stage of research it was realized that people inclined to dissociation find it harder to tolerate discontinuity in perceptual environments, possibly due to a rigid perceptual attitude...

When interacting with technology, attention is mainly driven by audiovisual and increasingly haptic stimulation. Olfactory stimuli are widely neglected, although the sense of smell influences many of our daily life choices, affects our behavior, and can catch and direct our attention. In this study, we investigated the effect of smell and sound on visuospatial attention in a virtual environment. We implemented the Bells Test, an established neuropsychological test to assess attentional and visuospatial disorders, in virtual reality (VR)...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive impairment is common in Parkinson's disease (PD) and highly associated with loss of independence, caregiver burden, and assisted living placement. The need for cognitive functional capacity tools validated for use in PD clinical and research applications has thus been emphasized in the literature. The Virtual Reality Functional Capacity Assessment Tool (VRFCAT-SL) is a tablet-based instrument that assesses proficiency for performing real world tasks in a highly realistic environment...

A patient suffering from visuo-spatial neglect was investigated as a special interest case during a study on the effectiveness of "restorative approaches" after visual field loss. This patient trained with our newly developed Virtual Reality (VR) system "Salzburg Visual Field Trainer" for 254 days. Perimetric results show a visual field expansion of 48.8% (left eye) and 36.8% (right eye) translating to an improvement of approximately 5.5° to 10.5° of visual angle. Further, subjective self-report shows improvements of up to 317% in visual field functionality...