CHS: Small: Enabling Accessibility of Virtual Reality for Persons with Balance Impairments

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Virtual Reality (VR) renders 3D computer graphics and sound in head mounted displays (HMDs) to make users feel as though they are in another place. Although consumer level HMDs are affordable enough to benefit a large user base, these devices are not accessible for many persons with balance impairments, such as elderly persons, persons with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, or stroke. Currently, immersive VR applications, such as education, physical fitness, rehabilitation, and entertainment, are not accessible to users with balance impairments. To address this need, the team of researchers will use a combination of visual, audio, and touch feedback to improve balance in VR. Although these methods have been effectively used in reality, they have minimally been tested in VR and it is unknown what the most effective combination of feedbacks are. If VR imbalance issues can be mitigated, persons with balance impairments may be able to more readily benefit from consumer VR. The project will also impact community outreach for persons with disabilities in that the investigators plan to give lectures at support groups and symposia on disabilities that will further educate persons with disabilities about VR. The project will also increase involvement of underrepresented minority students in research, because more than 59% of The University of Texas at San Antonio's students come from groups underrepresented in higher education. The overall objective of this project is to investigate multimodal techniques to improve balance in VR for persons with balance impairments, such as elderly persons and persons with neurological disorders. Based on the research team's preliminary studies, the central hypothesis is: sensory cues from a combination of multimodal feedback techniques, such as a visual static rest frame, auditory feedback on posture, and tactile feedback on posture from a vibro-tactile belt, will help to mitigate the imbalance effects, depending upon the cause of the imbalance. The idea will be to separately group the target populations due to several factors (e.g., clinical condition, age) and interpret the balance impaired human participants' experiences in VR based on that grouping. Ultimately, this research will result in a set of validated, gait-in-VR data and open-source tools that will make VR more accessible for persons with balance impairments, improving their quality of life. The project is creative and original because there has been minimal previous research into why VR causes imbalance and how it affects persons with balance impairments and hence, few works have explored solutions to this problem. The project is potentially transformative because it may disrupt accepted theories and perspectives of user interaction in VR, especially for persons with balance impairments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.