VR serious games for neuro-cognitive rehabilitation of patients with severe memory loss

Retrograde amnesia is a severe memory loss dramatically affecting patient’s quality of life. Traumatic brain injuries, strokes, degenerative processes or metabolic disorders are the main causes. At present, rehabilitation tries to recover patients’ memory by means of neuro-cognitive exercises guided by a physiotherapist. Unfortunately, the adherence to these rehabilitation exercises drops when patients are discharged from hospital. Furthermore, conventional rehabilitation is usually performed using standard exercises, which are not customized to each patient. The reproducibility of real environments and situations is a crucial feature to guarantee the efficacy of neuro-rehabilitation and it is defined as ecological validity. Ecological validity is important for making the exercises useful to re-learn specific information and for performing daily activities with the lowest effort. Nowadays, the traditional rehabilitation for retrograde amnesia is based on a set of pictures shown to the patient to remember or learn familiar environments, such as his/her home. This approach is very limiting because the patient can see few points of view of the home without learning and memorizing how to move and get into a specific room. Therefore, the traditional approach has a low ecological validity. The advent of innovative technology, like 3D scanners and virtual reality, permit the design of innovative solutions that virtually replicate patient’s home. This research work presents a novel procedure to design serious games for neuro-cognitive rehabilitation for patient with retrograde amnesia. The proposed procedure exploits low-cost and free technologies; in particular, the Occipital Structure sensor has been chosen as 3D scanner to acquire the 3D indoor environments, which are used inside Unity to develop the game logic of the serious games. The HTC Vive Pro head mounted display has been used to interact with the serious games in an immersive way. The designed procedure makes available a set of Unity scripts to develop the serious game for new patients by changing only the 3D environment (i.e., patient’s house). The procedure has been tested by creating three different serious games and the total time to create them can be approximated to a working day. The obtained results have been shown to medical personnel who have evaluated the proposed approach with a high ecological validity and decided to plan future medical tests by involving patients. © 2021 CAD Solutions, LLC, http://www.cad-journal.net.