VR cognitive training on end-users in Denmark and Romania. Preliminary results.
The next stage of the VirtuAAL project has already finished. All partners have been working hard in order to analyze how is VR cognitive training affecting to elderly people in nursing homes and daily centers. And we are very proud to announce the very positive impact that our innovative games have had on the end-users of this testing phase.
Testing our VR cognitive training on end users
Some months have already gone by after all partners met in the VirtuAAL’ kick of meeting in early June. In this first session, we started to define the strategic lines of a project that investigates whether cognitive therapies using VR & AR technologies can be successful and motivating for patients suffering from cognitive deterioration.
The VirtuAAL solutions
The solutions used for this testing phase have been developed by Ideable, and have consisted of three different games searching to reproduce familiar spaces to elderly users. Specifically, the screens were recreating these three different actions and places:
1. The act of frying an egg in a kitchen
2. The process of getting money out of an ATM
3. A table in a living room with some geometric shapes to move to their particular hole.
Feedback from end-users
The three games have been tested by almost fifty elder citizens in two end-user organizations in the cities of Aarhus and Bucarest. All the information gathered has been processed by eVida (University of Deusto) and the results are showing that the experience has been mostly positive for all the patients.
They have enjoyed this new kind of therapy more than doing a conventional one. And they even asked for exercising with more variety of screens, and with a higher difficulty, as well.
The results conclude that VR technology has made cognitive therapy more motivating for elderly patients. They pointed both bank and kitchen screens as their preferred ones, and also the HTC Vive technology more usable and successful than the Oculus system.
The augmented reality games also seemed a bit difficult for them so for the moment, the winning combination has been the using of HTC Vive glasses with Leap motion sensor integrated for tracking the movement of the hands. This is the perfect vehicle for performing cognitive stimulation therapies with them.
After this trial phase, the VirtuAAL consortium will keep on analyzing the results and developing solutions to become international leaders in VR cognitive training development.