The Effect of Real-Time Interactive Game for Patients with Visual Spatial Neglect

Abstract

Visual spatial neglect is a neurological syndrome characterized by a lack of awareness and explorative behaviors toward the patients’ contralesional hemispace It is a multicomponent disorder that is often combined with hemiplegia and anosognosia Therefore this multicomponent disorder should be treated with multiple therapies The purpose of this study was to develop a real-time interactive training system to rehabilitate patients with visual spatial neglect Two cases of left visual spatial neglect and one normal case were included The patients were trained 18 times over 8 weeks and the results were compared to those of the normal subject who received 10 training sessions The interactive software uses an image processing algorithm to separate the body image of the patient from a background image thus revealing only the patient’s image on the screen The patient sees their image which increases visual feedback and enhances the integrity of their sensory inputs Therefore this therapy decreases the severity of anosognosia allowing the patient to reconstruct their spatial representation The hand gesture recognition technique allows the patient to interact with the application This software combines concepts from different therapies to reconstruct brain neurons The results showed that patients improved attention ability Star Cancellation Line Bisection and Mini Mental State Examination test scores but no improvements on the Line Cancellation Test was observed This software helped the patients free themselves from the symptoms of visual neglect and may be a beneficial therapeutic technique

Date of Award	2016 Aug 25
Original language	English
Supervisor	Kuo-Sheng Cheng (Supervisor)