Virtual Reality rehabilitation tailored to older brain injury patients

随着欧盟人口老龄化，他们患上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(每年有110万欧盟患者)影响着社会的老年成员，并对个人产生重大影响，这些人可能需要更多的康复帮助，以保持和提高自己过上健康和充实生活的能力。目前，大脑康复是通过纸笔练习来刺激记忆、注意力和语言等能力。然而，对于那些大脑功能有问题的人来说，针对购物、公共交通等日常工作的最低限度培训往往会给他们带来压力。我们建议进行一次Eureka！合作研究项目，开发大脑康复，利用类似于现实生活场景的虚拟现实环境，如博物馆和商店，帮助个人建立他们每天都能用到的技能。该系统将使用虚拟现实硬件，该硬件配备了跟踪用户注意力、运动和情绪状态的传感器，以实现定制体验，为用户提供最佳的康复训练。生物信息将被用来为特定的用户量身定做难度和体验，以确保他们从培训中获得最大好处。我们的总体目标将是开发虚拟现实培训，将中风幸存者在康复中花费的时间平均减少两周，并将痴呆症患者的恶化速度减缓六周。拟议的项目将帮助我们了解用户的需求(以人为中心的设计)，并建立现有的技术能力，以开发吸引人的和互动的环境，改善用户的大脑康复过程。我们的最终抱负是将其推广到欧盟医疗保健和护理环境，以改善患者结果。

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.