Virtual Reality rehabilitation tailored to older brain injury patients

随着欧盟人口的老龄化，他们患影响大脑功能的疾病的风险增加，导致日常生活和护理需求的困难。痴呆症（预计到2030年将有1000万欧盟患者翻一番）和中风（每年110万欧盟事件）影响社会老年人，并对可能需要额外帮助康复的个人产生重大影响，以保持和提高他们过健康和充实生活的能力。目前，大脑康复是通过纸笔练习来进行的，这些练习可以刺激记忆力、注意力和语言能力。然而，针对日常任务的培训很少，例如购物，公共交通，这对那些大脑功能问题的人来说往往是有压力的。我们建议进行尤里卡！合作研究项目，利用类似于真实的生活场景（如博物馆和商店）的虚拟现实环境开发大脑康复，以帮助个人建立他们每天都能使用的技能。该系统将使用虚拟现实硬件，通过传感器跟踪用户的注意力，运动和情绪状态，以实现定制体验，为用户提供最佳的康复训练。我们的整体目标是发展虚拟实境训练，使中风幸存者平均可缩短两星期康复时间，并使痴呆症患者的病情恶化时间可减慢六星期。建议的项目将有助我们了解使用者的需要（以人为本的设计），并建立在现有的技术能力，以开发参与和互动的环境，改善大脑康复过程的用户。我们的最终目标是将其推广到欧盟的医疗保健和护理环境，以改善患者的治疗效果。

As EU populations age, their risk of disease that impacts brain function leading to difficulties in everyday life and care requirements increases. Dementia (10M EU sufferers projected to double by 2030) and stroke (1.1M EU events each year) affect older members of society and significantly impact the individual who may then need additional help rehabilitation to retain and improve their ability to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. Currently, brain rehabilitation is conducted via pen and paper exercises that stimulate capabilities such as memory, attention and speech. However, there is minimal training geared towards everyday tasks e.g. shopping, public transport, that can often be stressful for those with brain functionality issues.We propose to undertake a EUREKA! collaborative research project to develop brain rehabilitation that utilises virtual reality environments akin to real life scenarios e.g. museums and shops, to help individuals build up skills they can use every day. The system will use virtual reality hardware that is enabled with sensors that track user attention, motion and emotional state to enable tailoring of the experience to provide the best rehabilitation training for users. Bioinformation will be used to tailor the difficulty and experience to the particular user to ensure they derive the most benefit from the training.Our overall aims will be to develop virtual reality training that reduce the time that stroke survivors spend in rehabilitation by two weeks on average and slows deterioration of dementia patients by six weeks.The proposed project will help us to understand the needs to users (human centred design) and build on existing technical capability to develop engaging and interactive environments that improve brain rehabilitation processes for users. Our ultimate ambition to roll this out to EU healthcare and care settings to improve patient outcomes.