Developing an Immersive Environment for Visual Scanning Assessment and Training of Unilateral Spatial Neglect After Stroke and Healthy Baseline Assessment

Spatial neglect is a common outcome after stroke that often manifests in symptoms such as bumping into objects on one side, looking to the side of someone’s face during conversation, or neglecting to groom a certain side of one’s face. One common way to assess and treat spatial neglect is with visual scanning (identifying objects in one’s surroundings). However, this approach can require traveling to places with different environments or a clinician performing lengthy setup work, reducing intervention time. Additionally, the approach is conversation-based, and performance is subjective. Virtual reality is an emerging approach in spatial neglect research because it allows for supporting complex virtual spaces, measuring things quantitatively, and setting up and cleaning up the space quickly. We developed a virtual reality game for assessing and treating spatial neglect with visual scanning, and we did an alpha test of the game with five participants to test its assessment mode in four different virtual spaces. When finding items in a room, a spatial neglect patient will often take longer to find items in one direction. For a healthy individual, you would expect them to be able to find items in a room equally well between left, right, up, and down directions, which is what we found in our alpha test. Additionally, we found that the time to find items increases from a simple room to a visually complex room. Our software provides a foundation for this impactful new modality in spatial neglect therapy and assessment