An immersive virtual reality system for ecological assessment of peripersonal and extrapersonal unilateral spatial neglect (original) (raw)

Background Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a debilitating neuropsychological syndrome that often follows brain injury, in particular a stroke affecting the right hemisphere. In current clinical practice, the assessment of neglect is based on old-fashioned paper-and-pencil and behavioral tasks, and sometimes relies on the examiner’s subjective judgment. Therefore, there is a need for more exhaustive, objective and ecological assessments of USN. Methods In this paper, we present two tasks in immersive virtual reality to assess peripersonal and extrapersonal USN. The tasks are designed with several levels of difficulty to increase sensitivity of the assessment. We then validate the feasibility of both assessments in a group of healthy adult participants. Results We report data from a study with a group of neurologically unimpaired participants (N = 39). The results yield positive feedback on comfort, usability and design of the tasks. We propose new objective scores based on partic...