Cognitive and visual rehabilitation
Background
Visual and attentional disorders are common in the general population. Impairments in selective attention involve greater distractibility to irrelevant stimuli. These selective attention impairments have typically been reported in a large number of conditions including stroke, dementia, schizophrenia, depression, ADHD, and autism. Visual and attentional disorders can significantly impact daily functioning and quality of life.
What does it look like?
Extended Reality combined with eye tracking allows for precise monitoring and analysis of eye movements, enabling tailored visual exercises that target specific areas of need. As part of the XRehab project in Flanders, in which we co-created use cases with rehabilitation professionals and XR companies, we developed three prototypes to demonstrate different ways in which eye tracking can have an added value for clinical use when combined with XR. All prototypes are connected to an online dashboard for therapists to allow streaming, game settings and data visualization.
Prototyping
The first prototype is based on standard Goldmann perimetry. Eye tracking is adopted for central fixation control and detection of peripheral stimuli on a dark background can be assessed or trained. Reaction times and missed targets are recorded and visualized according to location. Hardware consists of the Quest Pro with integrated eye tracking.
The second prototype shows the possibility of uploading a 360 degrees picture/video in XR and eye tracking is adopted to demonstrate real-time eye movements in this environment. It can also present a heatmap of the eye movements. This prototype can be used to train spontaneous visual exploration in patients with attention disorders or visual disorders. Hardware consists of the Vive with integrated eye tracking and Tobii software.
The third prototype is a 360 degrees selective attention task where eye tracking is adopted as a response medium (gaze interaction, no motor response required). Subjects are required to detect targets between distractors in a forest. When looking long enough at the target, the target becomes animated and the next target is spawned. Difficulty levels and location of the targets can be adapted based on the performance of the subject. Reaction times and missed targets are recorded according to location. Hardware consists of the Quest Pro with integrated eye tracking.
“Ideally, we would first measure neglect in virtual reality (VR) and then initiate the intervention at the appropriate level and location (drawing more attention to the left and less to the right, for example) to achieve a more balanced attention distribution.”
— XRehab