Validation of a low-cost virtual reality system for training street-crossing. A comparative study in healthy, neglected and non-neglected stroke individuals

Abstract

Unilateral spatial neglect is a common consequence of stroke that directly affects the performance of activities of daily living. This impairment is traditionally assessed with paper-and-pencil tests that can lack correspondence to real life and are easily compensated. Virtual reality can immerse patients in more ecological scenarios, thus providing therapists with new tools to assess and train the effects of this impairment in simulated real tasks. This paper presents the clinical validation and convergent validity of a low-cost virtual reality system for training street-crossing in stroke patients with and without neglect. The performance of neglect patients was significantly worse than the performance of non-neglect and healthy participants. In addition, several correlations between the scores in the system and in the traditional scales were detected.

Keywords:

• Hemispatial neglect
• Unilateral spatial neglect
• Virtual reality
• Stroke
• Street-crossing

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the staff and patients of the Hospital NISA Valencia al Mar for their tireless and collaborative attitude, and José Antonio Lozano and José Antonio Gil for their early work. The authors also wish to thank the staff of LabHuman, specially José Roda, for their technical support.

This study was funded in part by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia Spain, Projects Consolider-C (SEJ2006-14301/PSIC), “CIBER of Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition, an initiative of ISCIII” and the Excellence Research Program PROMETEO (Generalitat Valenciana. Conselleria de Educación, 2008-157).