Imaoka Yu, Saba Nadja, Vanhoestenberghe Anne, de Bruin Eling D
Motor Control & Learning Laboratory, Institute of Human Movement Sciences and Sport, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Aspire Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technologies, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Med (Lausanne). 2020 Nov 16;7:533675. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2020.533675. eCollection 2020.
With the ultimate aim of early diagnosis of dementia, a new body balance assessment system with integrated head-mounted display-based virtual reality (VR) has been developed. We hypothesized that people would sway more in anterior-posterior (AP) direction when they were exposed to a VR environment where we intentionally provoked movements in forward and backward directions. A total of 14 healthy older adults (OA) (73.14±4.26 years) and 15 healthy young adults (YA) (24.93±1.49 years) were assessed for group differences in sway behavior. Body sway speed in 22 different conditions with and without VR environments was analyzed. Significant differences and large effect sizes were observed in AP sway under the VR environments (OA with < 0.02; effect size> 0.61, YA with < 0.003; effect size> 0.72) compared to the baseline condition without the VR environments. In addition, significant differences were found between the two groups in AP sway in all test conditions ( < 0.01). Our study shows that a VR environment can trigger body sway in an expected direction, which may indicate that it is possible to enhance the sensitivity of balance assessment by integrating immersive VR environments. The result of this study warrants a cross-sectional study in which OA diagnosed with and without dementia are compared on their sway behavior.
为了实现痴呆症的早期诊断这一最终目标，已经开发出一种新的身体平衡评估系统，该系统集成了基于头戴式显示器的虚拟现实（VR）技术。我们假设，当人们置身于一个我们有意引发前后方向运动的VR环境中时，他们在前后（AP）方向上的摇摆会更多。总共对14名健康老年人（OA）（73.14±4.26岁）和15名健康年轻人（YA）（24.93±1.49岁）的摇摆行为进行了组间差异评估。分析了在有和没有VR环境的22种不同条件下的身体摇摆速度。与没有VR环境的基线条件相比，在VR环境下观察到AP摇摆存在显著差异和较大的效应量（OA组，<0.02；效应量>0.61，YA组，<0.003；效应量>0.72）。此外，在所有测试条件下，两组在AP摇摆方面均存在显著差异（<0.01）。我们的研究表明，VR环境可以在预期方向上引发身体摇摆，这可能表明通过整合沉浸式VR环境来提高平衡评估的敏感性是可行的。本研究结果值得进行一项横断面研究，比较被诊断患有和未患有痴呆症的OA的摇摆行为。
