You'll have to ask your doctor to translate this to 5th grade English and get the protocol and the appropriate equipment
- 1Neurorehabilitation and Brain Research
Group, Instituto de Investigación e Innovación en Bioingeniería,
Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain
- 2NEURORHB-Servicio de Neurorrehabilitación de Hospitales Vithas, Valencia, Spain
The ability of virtual reality (VR) to recreate controlled,
immersive, and interactive environments that provide intensive and
customized exercises has motivated its therapeutic use after stroke.
Interaction and bodily presence in VR-based interventions is usually
mediated through virtual selves, which synchronously represent body
movements or responses to events on external input devices. Embodied
self-representations in the virtual world not only provide an anchor for
visuomotor tasks, but their morphologies can have behavioral
implications. While research has focused on the underlying subjective
mechanisms of exposure to VR on healthy individuals, the transference of
these findings to individuals with stroke is not evident and remains
unexplored, which could affect the experience and, ultimately, the
clinical effectiveness of neurorehabilitation interventions. This study
determined and compared the sense of embodiment and presence elicited by
a virtual environment under different perspectives and levels of
immersion in healthy subjects and individuals with stroke. Forty-six
healthy subjects and 32 individuals with stroke embodied a
gender-matched neutral avatar in a virtual environment that was
displayed in a first-person perspective with a head-mounted display and
in a third-person perspective with a screen, and the participants were
asked to interact in a virtual task for 10 min under each condition in
counterbalanced order, and to complete two questionnaires about the
sense of embodiment and presence experienced during the interaction. The
sense of body-ownership, self-location, and presence were more vividly
experienced in a first-person than in a third-person perspective by both
healthy subjects (
p < 0.001,
η2p
= 0.212;
p = 0.005,
η2p = 0.101;
p = 0.001,
η2p = 0.401, respectively) and individuals with stroke (
p = 0.019,
η2p = 0.070;
p = 0.001,
η2p = 0.135;
p = 0.014,
η2p
= 0.077, respectively). In contrast, no agency perspective-related
differences were found in any group. All measures were consistently
higher for healthy controls than for individuals with stroke, but
differences between groups only reached statistical significance in
presence under the first-person condition (
p < 0.010, η
2p
= 0.084). In spite of these differences, the participants experienced a
vivid sense of embodiment and presence in almost all conditions. These
results provide first evidence that, although less intensively,
embodiment and presence are similarly experienced by individuals who
have suffered a stroke and by healthy individuals, which could support
the vividness of their experience and, consequently, the effectiveness
of VR-based interventions.
Adrián Borrego
Jorge Latorre
Mariano Alcañiz
Roberto Llorens
