HVS 6D VR allows you to create highly controlled and completely replicable activities in naturalistic, real-world environments for patient rehabilitation. Patients can practise activities in the safety of the VR environments, gaining skills and confidence for their everyday life, at any level.
Where relevant the HVS 6D VR system automatically and consistently tracks, measures and analyzes behavior to allow assessment of skills such as object positioning, gait stability, balance, dual-tasking, visual tracking of a moving object, attention to instructions and directions, ability to follow specific instructions and directions (including for sequences of tasks), audio and visual sensitivity / desensitisation (including the effects of different levels of visual and audio stimuli on the above).
Where appropriate, biofeedback can be used to assess patients’ responses or for automatic adjustment of the VR experience according to the patient’s changing mental or emotional state. The VR experience can induce brain states and emotions that can be objectively measured by physical measures such as EEG, heart rate and skin conductivity, and the patient experience or task is adjusted in real time, in response to how the patient is doing.
Doctors, therapists or scientists can set tasks and exercises including:
- Way-finding, with additional analyses of ability to follow directions, including sequences.
- Attempting to walk in a straight line, with or without dual-tasking with a cognitive task.
- Balance exercises including standing, reaching, bending and turning, either on their own, as part of a task or while doing a cognitive task.
- Visual desensitisation. For this the doctor, therapist or scientist can make the environment relatively clear, busy or cluttered, in a repetitive or a chaotic way.
- Audio desensitisation. The doctor, therapist or scientist can make the environment quiet, or place a single sound source such as a radio near or far from the patient, or place multiple sound sources (e.g. in different rooms), such as different music or podcasts, which the patient will hear coming from the different directions.
- Object taking / fetching, with additional analyses of response to individual instructions and sequences of instructions.
- Tidying up / object manipulation, e.g. tidying kitchen items or stacking fallen books, with analyses of object manipulation skills, response to instructions.
- Visual inputs and active head movements, following an object visually using head movements.
- Community reintegration or activities, such as going to a store.
- VR equivalent of mirror therapy, e.g. for stroke rehabilitation. The patient moves one extremity (e.g. the left hand) and sees both extremities (both hands) moving simultaneously in VR. This promotes cortical restructuring.
- Asymmetrical lifelike functional movements in VR, with the patient seeing the body functioning fully in VR when they attempt the task.
- Deep relaxation.
- Pain management.
- Dementia therapy including physical exercise, cognitive stimulation and reminiscence.
Uses include studies and therapies relating to anxiety, depression, trauma, PTSD, stroke, amputation, phobias (e.g. using the principles of exposure therapy and cognitive behavior therapy), spatial learning, memory, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and any condition where a conventional rehabilitation activity could be replicated or enhanced with VR.
Drone’s eye view of the HVS 4D VR luxurious apartment. The 2D video does not do justice to the the VR experience but is provided for illustration.
Since you can’t experience HVS 4D VR yourself via a 2D screen, we hope this video of participants reacting will give you some insight: