Environmental Engineering Reference
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Personalization of Virtual Environments
Navigation and Tasks for Neurorehabilitation
Dani Tost, Sergi Grau and Sergio Moya
CREB-Polytechnical University of Catalonia
Spain
1. Introduction
The use of “serious” computer games designed for other purposes than purely leisure is
becoming a recurrent research topic in diverse areas from professional training and education
to psychiatric and neuropsychological rehabilitation. In particular 3D computer games have
been introduced in neuropsychological rehabilitation of cognitive functions to train daily
activities. In general, these games are based on the first person paradigm. Patients control
an avatar who moves around in a 3D virtual scenario. They manipulate virtual objects in
order to perform daily activities such as cooking or tidying up a room. The underlying
hypothesis of Cognitive Neuropsychological Virtual Rehabilitation (CNVR) systems is that
3D Interactive Virtual Environments (VE) can provide good simulations of the real world
yielding to an effective transfer of virtual skills to real capacities (Rose et al., 2005). Other
potential advantages of CNVR are that they are highly motivating, safe and controlled, and
they can recreate a diversity of scenarios (Guo et al., 2004). Virtual tasks are easy to document
automatically. Moreover, they are reproducible, which is useful for accurate analyses of the
patients behavior.
Several studies has shown that leaving tasks unfinished can be counterproductive in
a rehabilitation process (Prigatano, 1997). Therefore, CNVR systems tend to provide
free-of-error rehabilitation tasks. For this, by opposite to traditional leisure games, they
integrate different intervention mechanisms to guide patients towards the fulfillment of their
goals, from instruction messages to automatic realization of part and even all the task.
The main drawback of CNVR is that the use of technology introduces a complexity factor
alien to the rehabilitation process. In particular, it requires patients to acquire spatial
abilities (Satalich, 1995) and navigational awareness (Chen & Stanney, 1999) in order to find
ways through the VE and perceive relative distances to the patient's avatar. In addition,
interacting with virtual objects involves recognizing their shape and semantics (Nesbitt et al.,
2009). Moreover, pointing, picking and putting virtual objects is difficult, especially if the
environments are complex and the objects size is small (Elmqvist & Fekete, 2008). Finally,
steering virtual objects through VEs needs spatio-temporal skills to update the perception of
the relative distance between objects through motion (Liu et al., 2011). These skills vary from
one individual to another, and they can be strongly affected by patient's neuropsychological
impairments. Therefore, it is necessary to design strategies to make technology more usable
