Virtual reality as an assistive technology to support the cognitive development of people with Intellectual and multiple disabilities

Abstract

Virtual Reality has countless potential applications for the treatment and development of people with intellectual and multiple disabilities. A combination of traditional cognitive treatment and virtual reality-based methods can offer an effective, safe and interactive approach to the treatment of individuals with disabilities. Based on that, a computational method was proposed to develop a virtual reality system for supporting the cognitive and gross motor coordination development of those people, in a way that makes them more autonomous and able to do daily tasks, so improving their community participation, hence their social inclusion, by simulating and training common tasks people usually do on a daily basis. One of the main concerns of this work was to develop a low cost system, using standard and accessible devices. Furthermore, a hand-based manipulation made by augmented reality markers into the virtual reality environment was proposed, for providing a real-world experience, because, considering the cognitive and motor impairments of the participants, an interaction performed with their own hand would be easier, more intuitive and effective. The results of the experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of using virtual reality technologies for the cognitive and motor coordination training of people with intellectual and multiple disabilities, showing that the participants were able to do the task 40% faster on average in the case study 1, which is basically a simulator where the participant should going shopping in a supermarket, and also showing an improvement of 41% related to the mistakes made in the case study 2, in which the patient must to go through a series of challenges that train the gross motor coordination and body balance. Based on the data analysis done after the intervention and also based on the physiotherapist's observation, it was possible to prove that virtual reality-based method can be effective in the cognitive and motor skills development of people with intellectual disabilities.