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

Content Provider	Europe PMC
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
Editor	Leone, Alessandro
Copyright Year	2023
Abstract	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.
Journal	Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Volume Number	23
DOI	10.3390/s23115017
PubMed Central reference number	PMC10255506
Issue Number	11
PubMed reference number	37299744
e-ISSN	14248220
Language	English
Publisher	Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI)
Publisher Date	2023-05-24
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	serious game visuomotor adaptation avatar virtual reality body tracking Azure Kinect gait motion capture visual feedback human skeleton
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Biochemistry Instrumentation Information Systems Medicine Analytical Chemistry Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics Electrical and Electronic Engineering