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A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality

The study of visuomotor adaptation (VMA) capabilities has been encompassed in various experimental protocols aimed at investigating human motor control strategies and/or cognitive functions. VMA-oriented frameworks can have clinical applications, primarily in the investigation and assessment of neur...

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Autores principales: Suglia, Vladimiro, Brunetti, Antonio, Pasquini, Guido, Caputo, Mariapia, Marvulli, Tommaso Maria, Sibilano, Elena, Della Bella, Sara, Carrozza, Paola, Beni, Chiara, Naso, David, Monaco, Vito, Cristella, Giovanna, Bevilacqua, Vitoantonio, Buongiorno, Domenico
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10255506/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37299744
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23115017
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author Suglia, Vladimiro
Brunetti, Antonio
Pasquini, Guido
Caputo, Mariapia
Marvulli, Tommaso Maria
Sibilano, Elena
Della Bella, Sara
Carrozza, Paola
Beni, Chiara
Naso, David
Monaco, Vito
Cristella, Giovanna
Bevilacqua, Vitoantonio
Buongiorno, Domenico
author_facet Suglia, Vladimiro
Brunetti, Antonio
Pasquini, Guido
Caputo, Mariapia
Marvulli, Tommaso Maria
Sibilano, Elena
Della Bella, Sara
Carrozza, Paola
Beni, Chiara
Naso, David
Monaco, Vito
Cristella, Giovanna
Bevilacqua, Vitoantonio
Buongiorno, Domenico
author_sort Suglia, Vladimiro
collection PubMed
description The study of visuomotor adaptation (VMA) capabilities has been encompassed in various experimental protocols aimed at investigating human motor control strategies and/or cognitive functions. VMA-oriented frameworks can have clinical applications, primarily in the investigation and assessment of neuromotor impairments caused by conditions such as Parkinson’s disease or post-stroke, which affect the lives of tens of thousands of people worldwide. Therefore, they can enhance the understanding of the specific mechanisms of such neuromotor disorders, thus being a potential biomarker for recovery, with the aim of being integrated with conventional rehabilitative programs. Virtual Reality (VR) can be entailed in a framework targeting VMA since it allows the development of visual perturbations in a more customizable and realistic way. Moreover, as has been demonstrated in previous works, a serious game (SG) can further increase engagement thanks to the use of full-body embodied avatars. Most studies implementing VMA frameworks have focused on upper limb tasks and have utilized a cursor as visual feedback for the user. Hence, there is a paucity in the literature about VMA-oriented frameworks targeting locomotion tasks. In this article, the authors present the design, development, and testing of an SG-based framework that addresses VMA in a locomotion activity by controlling a full-body moving avatar in a custom VR environment. This workflow includes a set of metrics to quantitatively assess the participants’ performance. Thirteen healthy children were recruited to evaluate the framework. Several quantitative comparisons and analyses were run to validate the different types of introduced visuomotor perturbations and to evaluate the ability of the proposed metrics to describe the difficulty caused by such perturbations. During the experimental sessions, it emerged that the system is safe, easy to use, and practical in a clinical setting. Despite the limited sample size, which represents the main limitation of the study and can be compensated for with future recruitment, the authors claim the potential of this framework as a useful instrument for quantitatively assessing either motor or cognitive impairments. The proposed feature-based approach gives several objective parameters as additional biomarkers that can integrate the conventional clinical scores. Future studies might investigate the relation between the proposed biomarkers and the clinical scores for specific disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and cerebral palsy.
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spelling pubmed-102555062023-06-10 A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality Suglia, Vladimiro Brunetti, Antonio Pasquini, Guido Caputo, Mariapia Marvulli, Tommaso Maria Sibilano, Elena Della Bella, Sara Carrozza, Paola Beni, Chiara Naso, David Monaco, Vito Cristella, Giovanna Bevilacqua, Vitoantonio Buongiorno, Domenico Sensors (Basel) Article The study of visuomotor adaptation (VMA) capabilities has been encompassed in various experimental protocols aimed at investigating human motor control strategies and/or cognitive functions. VMA-oriented frameworks can have clinical applications, primarily in the investigation and assessment of neuromotor impairments caused by conditions such as Parkinson’s disease or post-stroke, which affect the lives of tens of thousands of people worldwide. Therefore, they can enhance the understanding of the specific mechanisms of such neuromotor disorders, thus being a potential biomarker for recovery, with the aim of being integrated with conventional rehabilitative programs. Virtual Reality (VR) can be entailed in a framework targeting VMA since it allows the development of visual perturbations in a more customizable and realistic way. Moreover, as has been demonstrated in previous works, a serious game (SG) can further increase engagement thanks to the use of full-body embodied avatars. Most studies implementing VMA frameworks have focused on upper limb tasks and have utilized a cursor as visual feedback for the user. Hence, there is a paucity in the literature about VMA-oriented frameworks targeting locomotion tasks. In this article, the authors present the design, development, and testing of an SG-based framework that addresses VMA in a locomotion activity by controlling a full-body moving avatar in a custom VR environment. This workflow includes a set of metrics to quantitatively assess the participants’ performance. Thirteen healthy children were recruited to evaluate the framework. Several quantitative comparisons and analyses were run to validate the different types of introduced visuomotor perturbations and to evaluate the ability of the proposed metrics to describe the difficulty caused by such perturbations. During the experimental sessions, it emerged that the system is safe, easy to use, and practical in a clinical setting. Despite the limited sample size, which represents the main limitation of the study and can be compensated for with future recruitment, the authors claim the potential of this framework as a useful instrument for quantitatively assessing either motor or cognitive impairments. The proposed feature-based approach gives several objective parameters as additional biomarkers that can integrate the conventional clinical scores. Future studies might investigate the relation between the proposed biomarkers and the clinical scores for specific disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and cerebral palsy. MDPI 2023-05-24 /pmc/articles/PMC10255506/ /pubmed/37299744 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23115017 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Suglia, Vladimiro
Brunetti, Antonio
Pasquini, Guido
Caputo, Mariapia
Marvulli, Tommaso Maria
Sibilano, Elena
Della Bella, Sara
Carrozza, Paola
Beni, Chiara
Naso, David
Monaco, Vito
Cristella, Giovanna
Bevilacqua, Vitoantonio
Buongiorno, Domenico
A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title_full A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title_fullStr A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title_full_unstemmed A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title_short A Serious Game for the Assessment of Visuomotor Adaptation Capabilities during Locomotion Tasks Employing an Embodied Avatar in Virtual Reality
title_sort serious game for the assessment of visuomotor adaptation capabilities during locomotion tasks employing an embodied avatar in virtual reality
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10255506/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37299744
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23115017
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