TY - JOUR
T1 - A Virtual Reality Four-Square Step Test for Quantifying Dynamic Balance Performance in People with Persistent Postural Perceptual Dizziness
AU - Aharoni, Moshe M.H.
AU - Lubetzky, Anat V.
AU - Wang, Zhu
AU - Goldman, Maya
AU - Krasovsky, Tal
N1 - Funding Information:
FSST-VR: An HTC Vive commercially-available system (HTC Corporation, Taoyuan City, Taiwan) was used for projecting the virtual environment and measuring head kinematics as part of the FSST-VR paradigm. The system was supported by a laptop PC (ASUS GL502VM-i7-7700H, NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070 graphic card and 32GB DRAM DDR4 memory). The virtual environments (programmed in Unity version 5.2.1f; ©Unity Technologies, San Francisco, California) include three levels of visual stimuli (Figure 1):
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Persistent-postural perceptual dizziness (PPPD) is a recently-defined diagnosis of chronic vestibular symptoms, which is exacerbated by exposure to moving objects and self-motion but is typically undetectable by clinical tests. The current work evaluates the feasibility of a novel paradigm for evaluation of dynamic balance within complex visual environments in people with PPPD-the Virtual Reality Four Step Square Test (FSST-VR). The FSSTVR measures spatiotemporal head kinematics while subjects perform the FSST pattern of 8 steps in a predefined sequence in a virtual environment of varying levels of visual complexity. Eight healthy individuals and 3 people diagnosed with PPPD were asked to perform the FSST-VR while spatiotemporal head kinematics and heartrate were measured. Additionally, participants reported their anxiety levels and cybersickness. Results indicated that performance of the FSST-VR is feasible and did not aggravate symptoms for people with PPPD. Descriptive statistics further may suggest that people with PPPD move less smoothly and perform smaller steps in anteroposterior direction, corresponding with the visual stimuli flow in the virtual environment. Data collection is ongoing and may provide further evidence as to dynamic balance in people with PPPD within complex virtual environments that mimic visual load in daily living.
AB - Persistent-postural perceptual dizziness (PPPD) is a recently-defined diagnosis of chronic vestibular symptoms, which is exacerbated by exposure to moving objects and self-motion but is typically undetectable by clinical tests. The current work evaluates the feasibility of a novel paradigm for evaluation of dynamic balance within complex visual environments in people with PPPD-the Virtual Reality Four Step Square Test (FSST-VR). The FSSTVR measures spatiotemporal head kinematics while subjects perform the FSST pattern of 8 steps in a predefined sequence in a virtual environment of varying levels of visual complexity. Eight healthy individuals and 3 people diagnosed with PPPD were asked to perform the FSST-VR while spatiotemporal head kinematics and heartrate were measured. Additionally, participants reported their anxiety levels and cybersickness. Results indicated that performance of the FSST-VR is feasible and did not aggravate symptoms for people with PPPD. Descriptive statistics further may suggest that people with PPPD move less smoothly and perform smaller steps in anteroposterior direction, corresponding with the visual stimuli flow in the virtual environment. Data collection is ongoing and may provide further evidence as to dynamic balance in people with PPPD within complex virtual environments that mimic visual load in daily living.
KW - HTC Vive
KW - dynamic balance
KW - head-mounted display
KW - sensory integration
KW - visual stimuli
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U2 - 10.1109/ICVR46560.2019.9082568
DO - 10.1109/ICVR46560.2019.9082568
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85076171801
VL - 2019-January
JO - International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation, ICVR
JF - International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation, ICVR
SN - 2331-9569
M1 - 9082568
T2 - 2019 International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation, ICVR 2019
Y2 - 21 July 2019 through 24 July 2019
ER -