Neuropsychological assessment of patients with neurodegenerative diseases by using immersive virtual reality environments.

Abstract

New media are a hybrid form, merging art with computing, and it is fitting to apply them to a transdisciplinary approach to design. One of the fields slowly responding to technological innovations is neuropsychology. Researchers have emphasized the necessity of increasing the ecological validity of neuropsychological measures, as the fixed assessment battery does not reflect the patient’s functioning in everyday scenarios. Immersive virtual reality provides an unprecedented opportunity to recreate real environments, thus enabling to perform executive functions assessment in a highly ecologically valid setting. With the supervision of a clinical psychologist, an application for Oculus Quest was designed with an objective to measure inhibitory control as a potential assessment tool for screening of first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. This multimedia project connects a highly immersive environment based on an everyday scenario with a script to measure inhibitory control.