Development of virtual environments for patient-centered rehabilitation

Context-sensitive rehabilitation integrates the individual background, needs, and strengths into the therapy of brain-injured patients [1]. Virtual environments can potentially enrich such individual rehabilitation approaches by providing realistic, lifelike situations for patients to train in. Virtual scenarios mostly are of high ecological validity, but usually require a long and costly development process. In order to use virtual environments for context-sensitive rehabilitation, an efficient workflow needs to be created which allows for rapid, cost-efficient development of such computer-based tools. The present study describes the requirements that are necessary for a clinic-based workflow and addresses each requirement in detail. Several complex virtual rooms within a rehabilitation hospital have been created and tested. Workflow efficiency, realism of virtual environments and validity of task-based use of these applications have been evaluated with healthy and brain-injured individuals. The virtual scenarios met requirements for timely production, and realism. The outcome of a mental map task, which was integrated intone environment, supports the validity of virtual cognitive assessments. Overall, results of this study suggest that individual virtual environments are a feasible addition to traditional context-sensitive rehabilitation.