Virtual Reality rehabilitation tailored to older brain injury patients

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.