virtual reality as a tool for evaluation of repetitive rhythmic movements in the elderly and parkinsons disease patients虚拟现实作为评价工具重复的节奏运动在老年人和帕金森症患者.pdfVIP

Virtual Reality as a Tool for Evaluation of Repetitive Rhythmic Movements in the Elderly and Parkinson’s Disease Patients 1 ´ ´ 1 ´ 2 2 1 Pablo Arias , Veronica Robles-Garcıa , Gabriel Sanmartın , Julian Flores , Javier Cudeiro * ˜ ˜ ´ 1 Neuroscience and Motor Control Group (NEUROcom), Department of Medicine-INEF Galicia, University of A Coruna, A Coruna, Spain, 2 Instituto de Investigacions ´ Tecnoloxicas, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Abstract This work presents an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) system to evaluate, and potentially treat, the alterations in rhythmic hand movements seen in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the elderly (EC), by comparison with healthy young controls (YC). The system integrates the subjects into a VR environment by means of a Head Mounted Display, such that subjects perceive themselves in a virtual world consisting of a table within a room. In this experiment, subjects are presented in 1st person perspective, so that the avatar reproduces finger tapping movements performed by the subjects. The task, known as the finger tapping test (FT), was performed by all three subject groups, PD, EC and YC. FT was carried out by each subject on two different days (sessions), one week apart. In each FT session all subjects performed FT in the real world (FTREAL) and in the VR (FTVR); each mode was repeated three times in randomized order. D