Personalised VR experience for patients with dementia within a secure psychiatric setting

Allowing dementia patients, who would normally be confined to a hospital, personalised virtual reality experiences from the outside world could go along way to improving their quality of life and mental state. The use of machine learning would be vital in creating more personalised experience which will result in a hopefully more effective system compared to what has already been made and tested. To understand different patients preferences of the virtual environments, I will use different sensors to monitor how they are reacting physically and emotionally. I am very interested in and have carried out some research into BCI and see that as a possibility for a potential sensor used. Ease of use will be a priority, because the apps generated will be deployed to VR headsets by users who will need very little training. My aim for this research would be to allow products or systems like this to be more accessible for other hospitals to use. In the future, I would like to see a more general use of this system in hospitals for other health disorders.

Semi structured interviews and observations are the primary research techniques I will use to gain information from the clinicians and patients. I will test the prototype with the clinicians first of all and see how they react and then perform the interview to understand what needs to be improved before testing it out on the patients. For the virtual reality aspect of the project, I will use unity, c# and VRTK to create virtual environments. Python and the Scikit library is what I would use for the machine learning aspect of the project. I believe unsupervised learning using cluster analysis would be a good place to start, to analyse what virtual environments appeal to different users and then classify them based on this. An evaluation of the pilot deployment would take place using the same research methods I mentioned above. From this, the system could be adapted and improved. I understand there are ethical and other issues when developing for, and testing products on dementia patients. Verbal communication could be tricky which means I may have to reevaluate my research methods throughout testing. Another thing I will consider is that dementia patients are generally older and will have less experience with technology which may effect testing and results.

I plan to undertake literature reviews and a pilot study within the first year of the PhD