Addressing Patient Motivation In Virtual Reality Based Neurocognitive Rehabilitation

Cognitive rehabilitation exercises are typically not designed to be motivating. The use of virtual reality and gaming technology can help with increasing the patient’s motivation and adherence. A physically active gaming experience leads to an increased adherence and affective attitude and an increased incentive to engage with healthy behavior. A psychological perspective on player motivation allows game design to explicitly focus on motivational variables, while affective gaming mechanisms allow games to infer the player’s affective state and change their content accordingly. This research project investigated if neurocognitive rehabilitation exercises based on affective gaming and physically active interaction lead to an increase in motivation of elderly people, while improving their cognitive skills. Part of this project was carried out at the Sensory-Motor Systems (SMS) lab1 , under supervision of the lab’s director Prof. Dr. –Ing. R. Riener. The SMS lab is associated to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, and the University Hospital Balgrist, Medical Faculty, University of Zürich, Switzerland. The goal of this project presented has been to develop and evaluate the hypotheses, methodology, and system prototype to enable the SMS lab to conduct a clinical experiment which investigates patient motivation in virtual reality based neurocognitive rehabilitation. A prototype system was created consisting of an affective gaming based training and assessment environment for the mental rotation task. This prototype system was used in a pilot study with 9 able-bodied and healthy participants aged 55 to 80. The results support the hypothesis that use of affective game design elements (e.g. incorporation of high scores, achievement medals, adaptive difficulty, different game modes and offering affective feedback) is motivating to the elderly population to engage with rehabilitation exercises. The results also support the hypothesis that a physically active gaming experience (provided by e.g. embodied interaction mechanisms) is motivating to the elderly. However more data is needed for the results to be more conclusive.

Subject

cognitive rehabilitation
virtual reality
affective computing
games

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master thesis

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