Design and Preliminary Evaluation of a Virtual Reality with Haptic Feedback Tool for Spatial Neglect Assessment and Rehabilitation

The present paper presents the design and evaluation of a virtual reality (VR) with haptic feedback based HEMISPATIAL NEGLECT assessment and rehabilitation tool. It benefits from an increasing number of studies exploiting the potentialities of VR technologies. The proposed tool consists of a home-made force feedback interface connected to a built-in VR environment with the required controller and interface. The proposed VR environment is intuitive for users since it represents the hospital that patients are usually visiting. The joystick is used as an input for the user that allows the displacement and navigation inside the virtual hospital, and simultaneously it creates vibrations and force feedback to the hand of the users. Several modules have been implemented and evaluated for hemispatial neglect assessment and rehabilitation. Promising results have been obtained.