VIRTUAL REALITY THERAPY

Yes, entirely. We always have a staff member with you at all times to ensure that you do not inadvertently bump into anything in the real world as you manipulate your virtual environment. Your therapist will be monitoring your performance to determine when you begin to fatigue, and will adjust or stop your exercises accordingly.

There are several different types of exercises we employ depending on the needs of your condition. For example, many people that have suffered concussions and mTBIs struggle with keeping their eyes and head synchronized while they follow moving targets. In these cases, we often use an exercise where they see a target circle that represents their central visual field. They are placed inside a virtual star field, and are tasked with tracking a moving planet by keeping it within their visual target circle. Other exercises involve manipulating objects with their virtual hands, or mirror images of their hands. Still others involve visually scanning a wall of virtual balloons, and popping ones with specific colors. 

The Virtualis system includes extremely lifelike and detailed simulations of shopping malls, escalators, moving sidewalks, subways, traffic intersections, driving cars, and even outdoor elevators. You are able to move around in these environments and manipulate virtual objects with your controllers.

Learning to master these challenging environments in a safe, progressive manner can go a long way towards helping you regain mastery of your activities of daily living, so you can get back to living the life you deserve.

As an example, when people struggle with dizziness and vertigo, whether as a primary condition or the result of an injury like a concussion, going grocery shopping can feel like a descent into hell. The task of scanning an extremely complicated visual environment while you move through the aisles filled with moving people is an extremely challenging neurological task. This can become an impossible one for patients struggling with dizziness and vertigo. Often the mere thought of going grocery shopping can be enough to provoke anxiety and even panic attacks. This can continue to be the case even after the dizziness and vertigo has been rehabilitated. 

Our Virtualis system contains an extremely lifelike virtual grocery store, wherein we can safely and gradually reintroduce this activity. You can walk around in the space, reach out and grab objects from the shelves, and put them in your virtual basket. The aisles are filled with other shoppers that you need to navigate around. We include working memory challenges by giving you a shopping list to memorize, and you go off to search for your items. We can make the environment progressively more complicated as you master the tasks, with longer lists and more people to avoid.

Shopping involves very high levels of neurological processing. It requires accurate eye movements as you look through the shelves. It involves gaze stabilization reflexes and integrates eye movement with head movement as you scan the environment, and translational vestibular reflexes as you move through the aisle. The extremely complicated visual environment increases the challenge, more so with all of the other shoppers moving through the space. This would be more than enough, but the cognitive load that comes with attempting to manage a shopping list is frequently enough to push people over their functional edge. 

With our Virtualis VR grocery store, we are able to manipulate every variable of a shopping task. This allows us to find the threshold where the task is challenging without provoking your symptoms, and gradually increase the level of challenge as you build neurological stamina. This helps us bridge the gap between performing well in the clinic, and mastering life in the outside world. VR therapy is thus often a critical component in your NeuroRescue Program.

No.