Interactive visuo-motor therapy system for stroke rehabilitation

We present a virtual reality (VR)-based motor neurorehabilitation system for stroke patients with upper limb paresis. It is based on two hypotheses: (1) observed actions correlated with self-generated or intended actions engage cortical motor observation, planning and execution areas ("mirror neurons”); (2) activation in damaged parts of motor cortex can be enhanced by viewing mirrored movements of non-paretic limbs. We postulate that our approach, applied during the acute post-stroke phase, facilitates motor re-learning and improves functional recovery. The patient controls a first-person view of virtual arms in tasks varying from simple (hitting objects) to complex (grasping and moving objects). The therapist adjusts weighting factors in the non-paretic limb to move the paretic virtual limb, thereby stimulating the mirror neuron system and optimizing patient motivation through graded task success. We present the system's neuroscientific background, technical details and preliminary result

Ecologically valid virtual reality-based technologies for assessment and rehabilitation of acquired brain injury: a systematic review

[EN] Purpose: A systematic review was conducted to examine the state of the literature regarding using ecologically valid virtual environments and related technologies to assess and rehabilitate people with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI). Materials and methods: A literature search was performed following the PRISMA guidelines using PubMed, Web of Science, ACM and IEEE databases. The focus was on assessment and intervention studies using ecologically valid virtual environments (VE). All studies were included if they involved individuals with ABI and simulated environments of the real world or Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Results: Seventy out of 363 studies were included in this review and grouped and analyzed according to the nature of its simulation, prefacing a total of 12 kitchens, 11 supermarkets, 10 shopping malls, 16 streets, 11 cities, and 10 other everyday life scenarios. These VE were mostly presented on computer screens, HMD's and laptops and patients interacted with them primarily via mouse, keyboard, and joystick. Twenty-five out of 70 studies had a non-experimental design. Conclusion: Evidence about the clinical impact of ecologically valid VE is still modest, and further research with more extensive samples is needed. It is important to standardize neuropsychological and motor outcome measures to strengthen conclusions between studies.This work is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through NOVA LINCS (UIDB/04516/2020); MACbioIDi2: Promoting the cohesion of Macaronesian regions through a common ICT platform for biomedical R & D & i (INTERREG program MAC2/1.1b/352); Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación of Spain (RTC2019-006933-7); and Conselleria d Innovació, Universitats, Ciència i Societat Digital of the Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEXG/2022/15).Faria, AL.; Latorre, J.; Cameirao, MS.; Bermúdez I Badia, S.; Llorens Rodríguez, R. (2023). Ecologically valid virtual reality-based technologies for assessment and rehabilitation of acquired brain injury: a systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology. 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.12333461

Towards Emotionally-Adaptive Virtual Reality for Mental Health Applications

Here we introduce the design and preliminary validation of a general-purpose architecture for affective-driven procedural content generation in Virtual Reality (VR) applications in mental health and wellbeing. The architecture supports seven commercial physiological sensing technologies and can be deployed in immersive and non-immersive VR systems. To demonstrate the concept, we developed the "The Emotional Labyrinth", a non-linear scenario in which navigation in a procedurally-generated 3D maze is entirely decided by the user, and whose features are dynamically adapted according to a set of emotional states. During navigation, affective states are dynamically represented through pictures, music, and animated visual metaphors chosen to represent and induce affective states. The underlying hypothesis is that exposing users to multimodal representations of their affective states can create a feedback loop that supports emotional self-awareness and fosters more effective emotional regulation strategies. We carried out a first study to (i) assess the effectiveness of the selected metaphors in inducing target emotions, and (ii) identify relevant psycho-physiological markers of the emotional experience generated by the labyrinth. Results show that the Emotional Labyrinth is overall a pleasant experience in which the proposed procedural content generation can induce distinctive psycho-physiological patterns, generally coherent with the meaning of the metaphors used in the labyrinth design. Further, collected psycho-physiological responses such as electrocardiography, respiration, electrodermal activity, and electromyography are used to generate computational models of users' reported experience. These models enable the future implementation of the closed loop mechanism to adapt the Labyrinth procedurally to the users' affective state