Development of a neurocognitive remediation system by virtual reality

Development and verification of a VR platform to evaluate wayfinding abilities

This study proposes a VR-based tool, named "Virtual City," to evaluate wayfinding abilities that are reported to decline with some cognition dysfunctions, such as dementia. This platform was designed according to cognition theories and took advantage of convenience of real-time recording by using VR techniques to make the evaluations less subjective and more accurate. Our previous study has shown the feasibility of using VR techniques to evaluate the sense of direction; we further use this newly developed tool to assess the effect of "screen type" and "reference landmark" on wayfinding performances. Experimental results show that subjects perform better with true-size 3D visual displays and reference landmarks, suggesting the factors that need to be considered for clinical application by using VR tools to detect cognition impairment in wayfinding.

Virtual hospital--a computer-aided platform to evaluate the sense of direction

This paper presents a computer-aided platform, named Virtual Hospital (VH), to evaluate the wayfinding ability that is found impaired in senile people with early dementia. The development of the VH takes the advantage of virtual reality technology to make the evaluation of the sense of direction more convenient and accurate then the conventional way. A pilot study was carried out to test its feasibility in differentiating the sense of direction between different genders. The results with significant differences in the response time (p<<0.05) and the pointing error (p<<0.01) between genders suggest the potential of the VH for clinical uses. Further improvement on the human-machine interface is necessary to make it easy for geriatric people to use.