Triggering Postural Movements With Virtual Reality Technology in Healthy Young and Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Validation Study for Early Dementia Screening

Frontiers in Medicine

article

Yu Imaoka¹  Nadja Saba¹  Anne Vanhoestenberghe²  Eling D. de Bruin¹ 

[1] Motor Control & Learning Laboratory, Institute of Human Movement Sciences and Sport, Department of Health Sciences and Technology;Aspire Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technologies, University College London, United Kingdom;Division of Physiotherapy, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institute

关键词: posture;    virtual reality;    dementia;    early diagnosis;    aging;    postural sway;    balance assessment;    head-mounted display (HMD);   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmed.2020.533675

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

With the ultimate aim of early diagnosis of dementia, a new body balance assessment system with integrated head-mounted display-based virtual reality (VR) has been developed. We hypothesized that people would sway more in anterior-posterior (AP) direction when they were exposed to a VR environment where we intentionally provoked movements in forward and backward directions. A total of 14 healthy older adults (OA) (73.14±4.26 years) and 15 healthy young adults (YA) (24.93±1.49 years) were assessed for group differences in sway behavior. Body sway speed in 22 different conditions with and without VR environments was analyzed. Significant differences and large effect sizes were observed in AP sway under the VR environments (OA with P 0.61, YA with P 0.72) compared to the baseline condition without the VR environments. In addition, significant differences were found between the two groups in AP sway in all test conditions ( P < 0.01). Our study shows that a VR environment can trigger body sway in an expected direction, which may indicate that it is possible to enhance the sensitivity of balance assessment by integrating immersive VR environments. The result of this study warrants a cross-sectional study in which OA diagnosed with and without dementia are compared on their sway behavior.

【 授权许可】

CC BY