A New Gem in Your Bag of Therapeutic Recreation Treasures

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A New Gem in Your Bag of Therapeutic Recreation
Treasures

• Describe how virtual reality is being used to
  assist individuals with disabilities
• Identify 3 technologies used for the development
  of virtual environments
• State the outcomes from the CATT project
• List four applications of computer-based leisure
  education
• List 3 resources available for using
  computer-based leisure education

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What is virtual reality?

• Do we really have to wear those silly glasses?

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Virtual Reality

• Developed in the late 60s by Krueger
• No consensus on meaning
• Seven concepts guide VR
• Simulation
• Interaction
• Artificiality
• Immersion
• Telepresence
• Full body immersion
• Networked communication

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Some Current VR Applications

• Training of employees
• Astronauts, assembly-line workers
• Games and Entertainment
• Corrections
• Product Promotion and Sales
• Healthcare Field

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Healthcare Applications

• Medical education and training
• Understanding of body (flying around, taking
  biopsy)
• Surgical procedures (remote surgery, augmented or
  enhanced surgery)

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• Basic Life Skills
• Virtual kitchen TBI
• Interactive kitchens, virtual store, virtual city
  and traffic safety developmental disabilities
• Get dressed, prepare shopping list, catch
  transportation, go and shop
• Experience different types of housing (e.g.,
  residential home, a house with no support, living
  with family)
• Understand issues concerned with living
  accommodations
• LD population (www.virart.nottingham.ac.uk/)

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• Driver Training Simulated Driving Situations
• Use with fear of driving
• Assessment and retraining driving evaluation,
  night driving, complex driving
• www.driVR.com

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• Movement Training
• Experimentally study relationship between
  sensory information and control of movement
• VR provides a way to enable walking by presenting
  virtual objects overlaid in the natural world
• Normal stride length
• With HMD, project a track of objects at
  stride-spaced intervals, facilitates normal
  walking patterns
• Provides visual information about muscular
  activity
• Parkinsons disease, stroke patients

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• Safety Training
• Used with children with physical disabilities to
  learn building layout
• Used with children with developmental
  disabilities, autism to learn shortest route for
  fire safety

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• Diagnosis and Treatment
• Virtual assessment tools for attention deficit
  hyperactivity disorder, TBI, neurodegenerative
  conditions (e.g., Alzheimers disease)
• Virtual classroom to replicate real-world
  conditions
• Body Image
• Web-based body image tests
• Examine eating patterns, assess actual and ideal
  body image
• Caloric intake registered and virtual scale shows
  patients their weight based on eating choices

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• Panic Attack, Agoraphobia, PTSD
• Create a hierarchy of VR situations
• War scene, elevator, supermarket, subway ride,
  large urban area, canyon with bridges, dark
  barn, balconies, airplane, public speaking
  auditorium, conference room
• Data glove-type motion, HMS, sound, haptics
• http//www.vrphobia.com

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• Disability Awareness
• Disability Virtual Reality Project Barriers
  The Awareness Challenge
• Uses 3-D computer graphics to depict a virtual
  grade school
• Teaches children and teachers without a
  disability about the structural and attitudinal
  barriers faced by peers with mobility impairment
• http//www.health.uottawa.ca/vrlab
• Wheelchair VR System
• Sit in an actual w/c on rollers and explore a
  simulation of a proposed structure (engineers and
  architects)
• Understanding Alzheimers Disease
• Simulates confused states, difficulty of tasks
  (caregivers)

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• Tracking and Awareness of Body Functions
• Virtual picture of own blood vessels in real time
• Migraine headaches, Raynauds Disease, peripheral
  vascular disease, diabetes
• VR Cave Synethesia project
• Track breathing, heartbeat
• Use with patients with emphysema (breathing and
  audioscape) can embellish related to COPD
• VR and Lung Cancer
• Increase smokers perceptions of smoking-related
  diseases

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• Distraction and Management (e.g., pain,
  insomnia/unrest)
• Distract dental patients from work being done
• Burn patients during PT and dressing changes
• Supplement to painkillers
• SpiderWorld
• Snow World
• Offset heat of burn victims pain

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• Mobility Training and Enhancement
• Stimulating memory retention in victims of
  amnesia and vascular brain injury
• Learn routes allows for repetition without
  distraction
• Train to Travel Project
• Basic travel skills recognition of landmarks
  and then simulation with repetition substituting
  VR bus rides
• Learning to cross street (http//pluto.huji.ac.il/
  msyuvain/)
• VR to train disabled children to control
  motorized wheelchairs (Dean Inman)

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Community Access Through Technology Project (CATT)

• www.mscd.edu/catt
• Goal to utilize VR to assist individuals with
  disabilities to access community recreation
  resources
• 3 yr. Project, Dept. of Education, RSA
• Create 3 Virtual Environments
• 20 Street Recreation Center
• Pepsi Center
• National Sports Center for the Disabled

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• Environments incorporate
• First person navigation
• Digital video, sound and captioning
• Maps
• Annotation
• NSCD guided tour
• Developed in Director, Flash, Shockwave,
  QuickTime
• Use Panoscan camera
• Leisure Education

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Demonstrate Virtual Environments

• 20th Street Recreation Center
• http//www.denvergov.org/dephome.asp?depid959
• Pepsi Center
• National Sports Center for the Disabled
• http//www.nscd.org/

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Test the Efficacy of VR

• 20th Street
• Subjects with physical disabilities residing in
  the community
• Random assignment to groups
• Control group
• VR only group
• VR-Leisure Education group
• Pre-test/Post-test on battery of instruments

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• Facilitated virtual reality tour (VR-LE) subjects
  had lowest anxiety (STAI p.104)
• Virtual tour alone did not alleviate anxiety
• Increased anxiety
• RIQ showed significant differences between both
  the VR-only group and the LE-VR tx. groups and
  the control groups (p.003)
• Significant negative correlation found between
  technology scores and pretest anxiety scores
  high technology knowledge scored lower on anxiety
  in pretest

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Pepsi Center Evaluation

• In-patient rehabilitation population
• Random assignment to groups
• Control group
• VR only
• Traditional leisure education
• Leisure education using VR
• Additional physiological measure
• Salivary cortisol
• Continue to collect data ending next week

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NSCD Evaluation

• Community-based subjects
• Random assignment to one of three groups
• Control group
• Guided tour
• Facilitated VR (VR-LE)
• Similar data collection tools and protocols
• Data just analyzed but not reviewed

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The technology eliminated the fear by providing
familiarity with the facility and preparation for
an environment that feels strange and
intimidating
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IN CONCLUSION