Summary
Background: Brain Injury (BI) has become one of the most common causes of neurological disability
in developed countries. Cognitive disorders result in a loss of independence and patients’
quality of life. Cognitive rehabilitation aims to promote patients’ skills to achieve
their highest degree of personal autonomy. New technologies such as virtual reality
or interactive video allow developing rehabilitation therapies based on reproducible
Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), increasing the ecological validity of the therapy.
However, the lack of frameworks to formalize and represent the definition of this
kind of therapies can be a barrier for widespread use of interactive virtual environments
in clinical routine. Objectives: To provide neuropsychologists with a methodology and an instrument to design and
evaluate cognitive rehabilitation therapeutic interventions strategies based on ADLs
performed in interactive virtual environments. Methods: The proposed methodology is used to model therapeutic interventions during virtual
ADLs considering cognitive deficit, expected abnormal interactions and therapeutic
hypotheses. It allows identifying abnormal behavioural patterns and designing interventions
strategies in order to achieve errorless-based rehabilitation. Results: An ADL case study (’buying bread’) is defined according to the guidelines established
by the ADL intervention model. This case study is developed, as a proof of principle,
using interactive video technology and is used to assess the feasibility of the proposed
methodology in the definition of therapeutic intervention procedures. Conclusions: The proposed methodology provides neuropsychologists with an instrument to design
and evaluate ADL-based therapeutic intervention strategies, attending to solve actual
limitation of virtual scenarios, to be use for ecological rehabilitation of cognitive
deficit in daily clinical practice. The developed case study proves the potential
of the methodology to design therapeutic interventions strategies; however our current
work is devoted to designing more experiments in order to present more evidence about
its values.
Keywords
Neurorehabilitation - cognitive rehabilitation - ecological rehabilitation - virtual
rehabilitation - interactive video - eye-tracking - activity of daily living - brain
injury
