Ijaz Kiran, Ahmadpour Naseem, Naismith Sharon L, Calvo Rafael A
Centre for Health Informatics, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
JMIR Ment Health. 2019 Sep 3;6(9):e13887. doi: 10.2196/13887.
Traditional methods for assessing memory are expensive and have high administrative costs. Memory assessment is important for establishing cognitive impairment in cases such as detecting dementia in older adults. Virtual reality (VR) technology can assist in establishing better quality outcome in such crucial screening by supporting the well-being of individuals and offering them an engaging, cognitively challenging task that is not stressful. However, unmet user needs can compromise the validity of the outcome. Therefore, screening technology for older adults must address their specific design and usability requirements.
This study aimed to design and evaluate the feasibility of an immersive VR platform to assess spatial navigation memory in older adults and establish its compatibility by comparing the outcome to a standard screening platform on a personal computer (PC).
VR-CogAssess is a platform integrating an Oculus Rift head-mounted display and immersive photorealistic imagery. In a pilot study with healthy older adults (N=42; mean age 73.22 years, SD 9.26), a landmark recall test was conducted, and assessment on the VR-CogAssess was compared against a standard PC (SPC) setup.
Results showed that participants in VR were significantly more engaged (P=.003), achieved higher landmark recall scores (P=.004), made less navigational mistakes (P=.04), and reported a higher level of presence (P=.002) than those in SPC setup. In addition, participants in VR indicated no significantly higher stress than SPC setup (P=.87).
The study findings suggest immersive VR is feasible and compatible with SPC counterpart for spatial navigation memory assessment. The study provides a set of design guidelines for creating similar platforms in the future.
传统的记忆评估方法成本高昂且管理成本高。记忆评估对于在诸如检测老年人痴呆症等病例中确定认知障碍至关重要。虚拟现实（VR）技术可以通过支持个体的幸福感并为他们提供一项引人入胜、具有认知挑战性且无压力的任务，来协助在这种关键筛查中取得更好的质量结果。然而，未满足的用户需求可能会损害结果的有效性。因此，针对老年人的筛查技术必须满足他们特定的设计和可用性要求。
本研究旨在设计并评估一个沉浸式VR平台用于评估老年人空间导航记忆的可行性，并通过将结果与个人计算机（PC）上的标准筛查平台进行比较来确定其兼容性。
VR - CogAssess是一个集成了Oculus Rift头戴式显示器和沉浸式逼真图像的平台。在一项针对健康老年人（N = 42；平均年龄73.22岁，标准差9.26）的试点研究中，进行了地标回忆测试，并将在VR - CogAssess上的评估与标准PC（SPC）设置进行了比较。
结果显示，与SPC设置相比，VR组的参与者参与度显著更高（P = 0.003），地标回忆得分更高（P = 0.004），导航错误更少（P = 0.04），并且报告的临场感水平更高（P = 0.002）。此外，VR组的参与者表示压力并不比SPC设置显著更高（P = 0.87）。
研究结果表明沉浸式VR对于空间导航记忆评估是可行的，并且与SPC对应物兼容。该研究为未来创建类似平台提供了一套设计指南。
Zotero 插件
