Abstract
Smart health technology includes physical sensors, intelligent sensors, and output advice to help monitor patients’ health and adjust their behavior. Virtual reality (VR) plays an increasingly larger role to improve health outcomes, being used in a variety of medical specialties including robotic surgery, diagnosis of some difficult diseases, and virtual reality pain distraction for severe burn patients. Smart VR health technology acts as a decision support system in the diseases diagnostic test of patients as they perform real world tasks in virtual reality (e.g., navigation). In this study, a non-invasive, cognitive computerized test based on 3D virtual environments for detecting the main symptoms of dementia (memory loss, visuospatial defects, and spatial navigation) is proposed. In a recent study, the system was tested on 115 real patients of which thirty had a dementia, sixty-five were cognitively healthy, and twenty had a mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The performance of the VR system was compared with Mini-Cog test, where the latter is used to measure cognitive impaired patients in the traditional diagnosis system at the clinic. It was observed that visuospatial and memory recall scores in both clinical diagnosis and VR system of dementia patients were less than those of MCI patients, and the scores of MCI patients were less than those of the control group. Furthermore, there is a perfect agreement between the standard methods in functional evaluation and navigational ability in our system where P-value in weighted Kappa statistic= 100% and between Mini-Cog-clinical diagnosis vs. VR scores where P-value in weighted Kappa statistic= 93%.
Highlights
Computers play a vital role as a decision support system in the diseases’ diagnostic test
This study proposes a 3D serious game containing a model for patient information storage and retrieval, and cognitive test-based Virtual reality (VR) System with semi-immersive type of methodology
It was observed that patients’ classification at clinic, which depended on the Mini-Cog test with functional evaluation, showed 94% accuracy, whereas VR system combined with navigational ability showed 97.22%
Summary
Computers play a vital role as a decision support system in the diseases’ diagnostic test. One of the most promising computerized methods is to measure patients cognitive performance as they perform real world tasks in virtual reality (e.g., navigation) [1,2]. Virtual reality (VR) is already making a difference in the health care industry. According to the National Institutes of Health [1], dementia is not a specific disease, it is a descriptive term of defects in the human brain, which leads to a collection of symptoms of neurocognitive dysfunction [1]. The strongest risk factors for dementia include chronic health conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, unhealthy lifestyle such as smoking, and family medical history [1]. Dementia can progress rapidly and, in a span of less than two years, can advance from the first symptoms to the stage
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